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.

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

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbo…/reviews/2011/368

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...