Thursday, April 30, 2015

Is Stephen Hawking an atheist or just a scientist?


Without taking anything away from Stephen Hawking's genius, I still feel the need to express my objections to his refutation of God on the basis of Science; yes 'Science' with an upper case S. I haven't been able to access the talk audio/video online and hence can only depend on media reports. Will be grateful if anyone can share a link of the lecture but it seems to me from the reportage that it's a classic symptom of Scientism that Hawking's argument underlines.
We don't need God because Science is God; it can explain everything. This isn't atheism but only a displaced religious discourse. It's simply a substitution of one metanarrative with another. The signifier God here isn't eschewed by any means but only replaced by Science with an upper case S. This is what Lacan called Science as Fantasy and Agamben, a 'signature' which doesn't produce a new concept but simply overflows the semantic field of its previous conceptual space.
Science has unfortunately become our Religion today and it's important to see through this fantasy and articulate that science isn't THE discourse but only one of the many discourses with a 'truth'-claim.

Reading Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions

One of the best Auster books I have read if not the very best, a complex narrative weave, a sparkling prose often bordering on the sensuousness of painting and poetry and not to mention a great narrative drive from beginning to end.
It's all music of chance, life in all its microscopic nuances and randomness: from mourning to peace, from the horror death to the appreciation of the mortal order of beauty in our fleeting world, from love and eroticism to heartbreaking melancholy, from the spectrality of archive to the necessary evil of hope in resumption of things, from the postmodern craftsmanship of frame narratives to an equally layered texture of affective intensity, The Book of Illusions has everything a reader would demand from a work of literature.



For me, above anything else, it's a book about the power of books, how writing and reading can mend a wounded mind on the verge of collapse, how books can cobble together, distant lives into a single thread, how translating a book exposes the self to the life of the other and paves way for identifications, how reading is always a dialogue and completeness of books always a posthumous phenomenon, how books can make you express and keep at bay your own suffering, how books open a future of faint hope against all odds of logic, how losing a book in your mind as well as in the world can kill you and how finishing and unfinishing a book both can finish you, how all books in all different languages at different nooks and crannies of this world speak to one another, how they whisper about things that were never there, things that could be there, how they seduce you into the unlived possibilities in the crevices of the lived life and this endless list is only punctuated by my unreadability.
It's all about the future of the illusion as if Freud says to Paul Auster and he responds with a silence that bites into words.
This is where cinema and novel meet, life and non-life too, a non-life that cannot spell the word death.

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Teaching at UWS

First class room teaching experience at University of Western Sydney (UWS)in an undergraduate module on The Introduction to Philosophy was interesting. I enjoyed myself and I think my students did too. It feels great to do some teaching after a couple of years. Not only because I taught for three years before leaving India but also because I have grown up in a family of teachers and teaching for me is lots more than just a profession. It's a way of life.

Badiou on Wagner and Lacan on Freud

"‘The French can be defined as those who claim to know what France is, while the Germans can be defined as those who do not know what Germany is’ (101-2), Badiou suggests, to which it is tempting to add that the French can also be defined as those who claim to know what Germans really mean." --This is as true of Badiou on Wagner as it is of Lacan on Freud smile emoticon
An interesting review of Badiou's recent book on Wagner

Badiou Aside


An aside Alain Badiou made in his 29 November, 2014 Sydney Art Gallery lecture (it's not a quote, more of a paraphrase. 'Corpse' is Badiou's word. 'Necrophiliac' is mine ) :- 

If god is dead, our love of god is a love for a corpse.
The love of god is hence the love of a necrophiliac.

Practice

"In the end, the problem is not so much that people forget, but that they do not always forget the same thing. What still exists as a memory for one person can be irretrievably lost for another, and this creates difficulties, insuperable barriers against understanding."
I am reading a Paul Auster book about a city where everything is being seen for one last time before they disappear from both the mind and the world.
Yesterday I did an English translation of Nabarun Bhattacharya's Bengali short story 'Cold Fire' for our Sanglap July 2015 Supplement on Nabarun Bhattacharya.
Today I found myself wandering through the Rookwood necropolis. It's always a curious feeling to walk on a ground with bodies underneath it. A graveyard walker is a rare vertical trace of movement in an immovably horizontal world. I was gearing up for this graveyard Sunday for a while though. As one of Beckett's characters says in a short story, the dead are much more interesting company than the living.
The book I am reading, the story I translated and the day I lived through the Shakespearean 'rooky wood'---they are all permeated with a dying I can see, the death of which I am never going to see!

Beckett text and memories of reading

"It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. I am calm. All is sleeping. Nevertheless I get up and go to my desk. I can’t sleep. My lamp sheds a soft
and steady light. I have trimmed it. It will last till morning. I hear the eagle-owl. What a terrible battle-cry ! Once I listened to it unmoved. My son is sleeping. Let him sleep. The night will come when he too, unable to sleep, will get up and go to his desk. I shall be forgotten."

----One of my favourite Beckett passages from Molloy. This is the beginning of the second part--the narrative of Moran. I still get the shivers while reading the telling last sentence of the paragraph. It's not 'I will be forgotten' but 'I shall be forgotten'. How haunted the mortal human subject is by the complete oblivion that awaits him or her in the so-called after-life.
It's more of an after-time than after-life. Life perishes and time alone remains. Perhaps a blurry web of memory lingers in that after-time until those who remember us are gone for good and we are completely forgotten. Against the timeless scale of time, even trans-generational memory shuts down after two or three generations.
I remember the old soiled copy of Molloy in the Presidency College Library in 2004. When I borrowed it, I was its first borrower since the 1960s. That was the beginning of my years with Sam, slowly going through every sentence of a sparklingly dense prose that changed both the joys and the sorrows of my life.
Sam, I know 'I shall be forgotten' but you shall never be...

Reading The Music of Chance

He felt like a man who had finally found the courage to put a bullet through his head--but in his case the bullet was not death, it was life, it was the explosion that triggers the birth of new worlds"
A bitter-sweet book about the humanity of loss, among other things...
 — reading The Music of Chance.

Derrida...Visor

Jacques Derrida on the visor effect of the specter with reference to Hamlet:
"The specter is not simply this visible invisible that I can see, it is someone who watches or concerns me without any possible reciprocity, and who therefore makes the law when I am blind, blind by situation. The specter enjoys the right of absolute inspection. He is the right of inspection itself."
['Spectrographies']

On hearing Prof. Ashis Nandy at ANU March 17, 2015

Prof. Ashis Nandy's talk at ANU last night on the future of the university system raised questions regarding the epistemological function of the university.
Does the modern university address the knowledge cultures which lie outside of its own space?
Does it scan knowledge on society's behalf or simply carry on an internal dialogue, scanning the knowledge the university itself produces?
These are elementary and yet fundamental questions in what's called critical university studies today.
The talk made me think about the distinction between knowledge and truth.
Do you think the university acknowledges (to get stuck with the word knowledge again) truths which are lived at the cost of knowledge attained?
Is the university knowledge system equipped to deal with the regime of truths which can only be approached by sabotaging academic knowledge?
Isn't that fundamental to what Tagore tried to do with Viswa-Bharati?
Another question waiting to be asked in between the lines of Prof. Nandy's talk is the status of orality and memory in knowledge cultures and the university's purchase on that.
All in all, an enriching evening of thoughts.

Nostalgia and Laughter

Benjamin Black's The Lemur 

"His memories of those days were all hazed over happily, as if he were looking back through a pane of glass that had been breathed on by someone who was laughing."
How that word 'laughing' at the end alters the sense by nudging the nostalgia cliche developed throughout the sentence! Is the nostalgic spell of dreamy half-remembrances caused by a laughter which laughs at nostalgia itself? Nostalgic deflection is produced by an ironic laughter which puts nostalgia itself at a distance. To have a different effect of sense, we can say that this double-movement is precisely what defines nostalgia.


Monday, April 27, 2015

On Reading Coetzee's Three Stories



These three late stories by Coetzee capture him in his elegant prose of poise as he explores ownership and love in the narrator's changing relation with his transnational Spanish house in 'A House in Spain', half-mourns and half-celebrates the passing away of an old pastoral economy in 'Nietverloren' and delves into an epistolary dialogue with his alter-ego as an asymptotic treasure trove of stories which can neither end nor go on in 'He and his man'.
The anonymous reflections of three undefined narrators in the three stories create a melancholic refuge for the self that feels old and odd in a rapidly changing world. Reading these stories is like reading a series of very personal diary entries that are so private that they become impersonal.
The house in Spain acts like a memorial for the self, facing mortality while the small patch of barren land around the old world farm house in South Africa awaits inscriptions on its surface, never to return in the passage of time and the letters from 'he' to 'his man' and vice versa trace a difficult relationship, suspended half way between proximity and distance.
Each of the three brief stories, the third one being the most complexly layered, is a meditation on impossible relationships between the human subject and the non-human world of in-animate houses, lands and letters.
JM Coetzee's humanity is inflected by their in-humanity.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

The Sydney Theatre Company experience of weaving Endgame



Sydney Theatre Company's production of Endgame brought to surface, the deep-seated comedy of unhappiness in Beckett's play. The performance was keyed at the level of music hall and vaudeville, using that aspect of Beckett's theatre, not to neutralize its profound sense of philosophical gloom but to establish a dialectically contrastive framework. The actors played it full on using the slapstick against Beckett's insistence on colourlessness. While it worked with Hamm, brilliantly played by Hugo Weaving, showing great understanding in the ambiguous feelings involved. Though he did overplay the comic bits, he also fused great insight into Hamm's majestically frustrated and sardonic monologues. Tom Budge as Clov was excellent as a vaudeville clown but a touch flat, lacking in the perfect tragi-comic or should I say comi-tragic balance of hope and despair, so very essential in Beckett. As he oscillated between the forced deadpan of a poker-face and a laboured vaudeville delivery, the expressions that lined his face looked hasty. Weaving whose face broke into the complex poise of thoughts in transition was more balanced. I didn't like the way Nell and Nagg were played. Their sentimentalism and hysteria were not marked with the necessary self-reflexivity and Nell's beautiful lines about the deep clean waters of Lake Como and Nagg's story about the English tailor which contains some of the best writing in the play fell somewhat flat on their faces. 



The set, costumes and everything else were more or less faithful to Beckett and though all of it was good, these components did not show a striking adaptive originality. Having said that, I would agree with Edward Albee, that playwrights like Shakespeare and Beckett do not need a great deal of theatrical adaptation; so precise and yet so open is the material. The gesticulations of Clov clearly overstepped Beckettian limits but Hamm provided a much needed calmative by beautifully dramatizing what Beckett had famously called the 'power of the text to claw' in Endgame. All movement was meticulously choreographed and Clov's opening scene where he measured the sheets while folding and unfolding them at the same time, the way he carried the ladder and Hamm's counting of Clov's steps as he went up the ladder were all done with an eye for Beckettian details and nuances from the oeuvre as a whole. The light was apposite and so was the costume. Overall a very good performance which could have been great, had the rest of the cast matched Hugo Weaving's Hamm. It's more than watchable only for him if not anything else. I look forward to him doing more Beckett after Vladimir and Hamm. Let him weave Krapp next! Fingers crossed. Spoool!!!

Lisa Dwan's Not I

The new record breaking Not I performed quite brilliantly by Lisa Dwan who does the Mouth in little less than ten minutes. As we stare into the mouth projected from an issueless darkness, the lips take on a life of their own, standing for a thinking that's performed not just by the head but the whole body. To her great credit, Lisa invests the image of the mouth with a faceless face, thinking 'not thought' but 'profounds of mind', journeying towards 'mindlessness'

On Reading Mr. Vertigo by Auster

Fabulously fabular, heartbreakingly beautiful with the bizarre and yet rich colours of a life lived out of the skin, as always Auster is a delight to read. The rise and fall of an icon, an intensely personal story in the extensively public times of the War, the shocks and surprises of life, from levitation to vertigo, from childhood to advanced old age, from mastery to servitude and from a desire to repeat the observable patterns of your life to a contingent opportunity to break with the patterns, the book is bathed in every possible tincture of humanity

নতুন বছর

নতুন হলে তবেই নতুন বছর। সবাই ভালো থাকলে তবেই ভালো। 
স্কুল কলেজে খুনখারাপি, বোমা মারামারি বন্ধ হলে নতুন বছর। 
বাঙালী ছেলেমেয়েরা আরেকটু বাংলা বললে পড়লে লিখলে নতুন বছর। 
আরেকটু বেশি সংখ্যক লোক খেতে পরতে পারলেও নতুন বছর। 
এইসব অসম্ভব নিয়েই নতুন বছর। 
সবাইকে শুভেচ্ছা।

On Peter Carey's Amnesia

Well, Peter Carey isn't an Opera House lover for sure wink emoticon
"He had a cooktop in his room so he could have spaghetti and grill sausages and lamb chops and, at this particular moment, launder his underwear which ballooned from the boiling saucepan in shivering dome-like tents suggestive of soap bubbles and the Sydney Opera House"

Just finished reading Peter Carey's latest novel Amnesia which turned out to be a virtuoso act of storytelling with complex layers and switches punctuating a narrative, unifying political history with saga of love and environmentalism with technology as a paradoxical means of protest. Carey's narrator changed gears from a first person point of view to a third person omniscient one till the omniscience broke apart and the first person staged a return at the end. Overall, a racy political thriller which also offers an oblique commentary on the new technological powers of writing to change the world as well as the world-wide-web.


At Mount Ainslie, Canberra, Australia

Hills were remembering rain as I remembered the walk...remembrance is all about present, bereft of past and indifferent to future...and the yellow leaves of autumn soaked in rains of renewal, a constant companion in the inward ramble...

Stories and belief...stories in belief

"I had been tricked into believing him, and that was the only thing that mattered. As long as there's one person to believe it, there's no story that can't be true."
***
How simply and yet how profoundly Paul Auster spells out the complex nature of fictional truth or should I say the paradoxical fictionality of truth in fiction. In his self-reflexive Christmas fable, 'Auggie Wren's Christmas Story', there comes this climactic point where truth in fiction is defined not in terms of veracity or verisimilitude but in terms of belief.
Literature sides with an open belief and its 'weak' agency of truth with which a more rigid idea of faith in power and power in faith can be resisted. And yet literature seems to demand belief in stories as a truth-making criterion wherein lies its risk as well as its potential agency to critique.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Auster Quote

"Each time he goes out, he takes his thoughts with him, and during his absence the room gradually empties of his efforts to inhabit it."
I had always thought to have written something like that somewhere but it turns out to be Paul Auster smile emoticon Precisely my thought! Only that he wrote it before I was born, in the early 1980s!

Auster Read

"There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: they have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. They are there and yet not there: tangible ghosts, condemned to survive in a world they no longer belong to."

Paul Auster's first novel/autobiography/self-writing is perhaps his most beautiful book.

 The Invention of Solitude.

Cricket WC 2015 Final

Aussies played like world champions and won like world champions. It has been a resilient comeback from a team that was struggling with inexperience and rank newcomers only four years back. Credit must be given to Clarke's exemplary leadership and the dignified decision to retire reinforces his great contribution to the team. Sometimes you have to end your own future for the team's better future. The game will miss him. I hope he has an extended test career. Congratulations Australia. NZ the eternal underdogs fought hard but this wasn't their day. I feel bad for Martin Crowe, the great kiwi batsman on his last pins who so wanted his boys to win for him. His words at the beginning were poignant to say the least. It was like Sunil Gavaskar saying that he would want to watch MSD's winning six in Mumbai, 2011 on his deathbed as the last image from the world of the living. As Sachin had said, he would hear the 'Sachin Sachin' chants even at the time of his death. Great cricketers live and die cricket. Strength to Martin Crowe and his family.

Lara and Joyce

A day begun with Brian Lara at the UWS Cricket Community Day ends with James Joyce at Sydney Theatre Company's Riverrun performance.
Seeing Lara bat once again after years brought back great memories of boyhood and all the sleepless nights of watching the master play those flashing drives and cuts and pulls deep into the west indian shadow that would throng the fences in the stadiums without floodlights. Snaps to follow soon...
Olwen Fouéré's solo invocation of the river's voice in JJ's Finnegans Wake was rigorous and corporeal. She danced, she sang, she stripped, she breathed and whistled into the microphone and she menaced us with her silent standing presence on the playing area from the moment we entered the auditorium. She made us feel the malleable materiality of the great text as it broke the waves in her body. Her exhilarating corporeal voice melted into the 'foriver' of time as she etched a writing in the sand with her swift steps. If the river running through the novel is the bloodstream of our body, among other things, Olwen's reiterative use of breath to externalize that stream as a pausing motion on the water made me think that breath is a translation of blood. It transfers the river from the inside to the outside, from water to air and remains in this, the fundamental ontological unit, inside out in relation to the voice.

The Culture of Protest: Jadavpur University Protest about Menstrual Taboo

Writing on the sanitary pads shows how the 'letter' can replace the litter/ biological waste: blood in this case.
The Symbolic use of the pad which uses the object as a writing surface has a slant towards the Real in the sense that this writing is written onto a tabooed surface which is otherwise considered 'unwritable'!
What throws the cat among the pigeons is the equivocation of the signifier 'pad' as in a writing pad.
The culture of protest is a creative act.

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/the-buck-stops-here/stop-sexism-period-why-these-girls-are-using-sanitary-pads-to-protest/362096?curl=1428070793