Abstracts

Day 1
1) Nirmalya Narayan Chakraborty (Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata)

Time, Knowledge of Time and Temporal Objects: An Emperico-

Phenomenological Analysis

The present talk attempts to decipher the classical Indian Realist view of time. Following

a proposed definition of time, an inference is formulated to account for our knowledge of

time. An analysis of this inference leads us to the dual aspect of knowledge of time: 1.

Direct experience of time and 2. Indirect experience of time. This distinction, one might

think, leads to the idea of time as one and indivisible. An attempt will be made to explore

this idea of so-called Absolute time. The view on the opposite extreme holds that only the

present is ontologically privileged. A meaning-theoretic approach could be undertaken to

understand this debate between the advocates of Absolute time and those of fractured

time into past, present, and future.

2) R. Krishnaswamy (OP Jindal Global University)

Multiple Modernities: Re-thinking Time and History

I want to in this presentation problematize the idea or phenomenon of acceleration which

has come to categorize, within social theory, an important aspect of modernity. Within

theories of modernity, it is accepted that we live in ‘accelerated’ times. In other words,

accelerated living is thought to constitute our temporality. By temporality, I mean a form

of experience through which we connect our past, present and the future. It is temporality

that informs the set of expectations and experiences we have at the historical stage. As

opposed to this is the idea of ‘natural time’ which refers to time signified by cycles of

seasons, clocks, calendars etc. I will first unpack what this temporality of acceleration is

said to imply by showing the relationship that exists between time and temporality.
 Following that, I will show that the phenomenon of modernity exhibits a form of

temporality, which though is a consequence of a set of unique larger historical events in

the world in the last 250 years or so, need not be tied constitutively only to those set of

events. I will further talk about how the experience of time itself is structured in such a

way that we can’t justify any attempt to talk about modernity as a single large framework

that has come to influence self-reflective patterns of thought across the world. In fact, I

will make a case for how there are different modernities that can exist at the same time and

thereby make a case for different kinds of accelerated temporality. I will be using mainly

the ideas of Reinhart Koselleck to underpin my argument. Ultimately, I will also draw some

provisional lessons on the relationship between conceptual schemes and the possibility of

narratives.

3) Professor Saulius Geniusas (Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Metaphysics as Transformed Phenomenology? Husserl's Project of

Transcendental Teleology

My talk is concerned with four issues. I begin with reflections on the relation between

phenomenology and metaphysics. I show that monadology, teleology and theology

constitute the three essential parts of Husserl’s phenomenological metaphysics. As my

second step, I reconstruct the essential features of Husserlian teleology. I argue that it is

neither a teleology of nature, nor a teleology of the world in itself, but a teleology of world-

constituting subjectivities, considered in terms of their generativity. As my third step, I

clarify the function of Husserl’s reflections on teleology in the overall framework of his

phenomenology. I argue that Husserl turned to reflections on teleology so as to address

the fundamental issues in his phenomenology and that teleology performs a rational,

existential and ethical functions in phenomenology. As my fourth and last step, I engage

in further thoughts on whether or not Husserl’s reflections on teleology can be said to be

nonetheless contest the view that they are just as garb of ideas thrown on the world. I

suggest that Husserl’s reflections on teleology are of a provisional nature: they constitute

a task, which Husserl had only started to address and that he was hopeful that the future

generations of phenomenologists would continue.

4) Ananya Vajpeyi (CSDS)

At the Faultline of Modernity: Sanskrit and Psychoanalysis:

I set out to answer two questions: What is Sanskrit? Why do we care about it? I investigate

what makes the language live despite its purported death, what makes it modern despite its

origins and efflorescence in the distant past, what has allowed it to travel outside of the

Indian subcontinent for as long as it has existed, and what lifts it out of the dead letter of

ritual and scholasticism into the seething battleground of religion and politics in India

today.

Histories of Sanskrit literature and philosophy, as well as a vast technical literature about

Sanskrit in the disciplines of linguistics, philology and religious studies already exist aplenty.

However, until now there is no single account of the role of Sanskrit in decolonizing,

independent and post-colonial India, whether as a guarantor of modernity or as a

repository of tradition; whether as a signifier of classical authority in secular-liberal

ideology, or as a source of Hindu identity in right-wing ideology. The modern life of

Sanskrit proceeds not just through abstract discourses of state / gender / caste / religion

/ politics / race / culture and so on, though it does that as well. Rather, or additionally,

there have been a handful of intellectuals and theorists in the modern era, not just in India

but also globally, who have mediated how we think about Sanskrit and recontextualized it

in unexpected ways. Such figures include Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the father of
 modern linguistics and of the theory of structuralism that became salient for a number of

disciplines in the humanities and social sciences throughout the 20th century, who was a

Sanskritist in the first instance, and Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a maverick Sanskritist (still

alive, b. 1941), a student of Daniel Ingalls at Harvard, who re-trained as a psychoanalyst,

was appointed by Anna Freud as the keeper of the Freud Archive, then became critical of

Freudian psychoanalysis and was cast out, ending up as an outsider relative to both the

Indological and the psychoanalytic scholarly communities (he now works on animal rights).

The work of scholars like Masson and Doniger is fascinating because they bring to the

table explorations of gender, sexuality, eroticism, trauma, incest, violence, memory,

dreams, childhood, desire and so on, a plethora of themes from the psychoanalytic

repertoire, and use them to read some of the key texts of literature, religion and philosophy

from the Sanskrit corpus. However, psychoanalytically-inflected "readings" of Sanskrit

epics, drama, Purāṇic narratives etc. as a form of textual criticism are only one way in which

Sanskrit enters into a modern form of knowledge like psychoanalysis.

In fact, I would argue that Ashis Nandy's analysis of nationalism, secularism and Partition,

and the way in which he traces these political phenomena in India back to the psychology

of colonialism, are equally germane to our understanding of why and how Sanskrit

continues to live even to the present, if anything rising from the ashes thanks to Hindutva.

5) Arun Iyer (IIT Bombay)

In Truth and Method, Gadamer outlines a position which is opposed to both

Schleiermacher and Hegel, both of whom he characterises as variants of a historical

consciousness. Historical consciousness, which Gadamer sees emerging in the nineteenth

century, is incapable in his view of doing justice to the dimension of history. Why is

historical consciousness unable to do justice to the dimension of history? How is the

historical consciousness in Truth and Method, I would like to answer these two questions

by going through some unpublished essays of Gadamer on modern philosophy to show

how he conceives of the link between historicity and finitude which for him is the key to

understanding the dimension of history and the inadequacy of historical consciousness.

Day 2

1. Meghant Sudan (Boise State University)

Hegel's 1827 Gita Interpretation and the History of Spirit

Hegel’s essay on the Gita is the record of a fascinating encounter between the last of the

great metaphysicians and a prophet of western modernity and newly available foreign

material from the ancient orient. This fascinating text straddles religion and philosophy,

ethics and ethnography, and language and spirit, in the course of claiming to grasp the true

essence of Indian spirit itself. In it, Hegel engages recent trends in nascent sciences of the

human spirit, like anthropology and philology, and endeavours to reconcile them with his

own systematic construction of world-history. While the result of these efforts is Hegel’s

surprising invocations of the Gita at the highest reaches of his philosophical system, a

study of his Gita essay makes visible the laborious, behind-the-scenes working out of his

mature theory of history, as he painstakingly joins together a naturalized account of the

global process of modernity with an eternalist cultural-historical account of religious,

aesthetic, and intellectual forms.

2. Nishad Patnaik (IIITD)

Genealogies of Modernity: Disenchantment and the Form of Unalienated Life

The paper attempts to reimagine emancipatory possibilities in the face of reified capitalist

modernity. The critical thrust of ‘enlightened’ reason has always been the disenchantment
 of the world—stripping it of ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’, which come to be seen as

anthropomorphic projections. The disenchanted world, in its capitalistic figuration,

alienates us from each other, and from nature. To rearticulate emancipatory possibilities

therefore, requires a non-alienated conception of both society and nature. However, the

disenchantment ushered in by the critical-reflective rationality of the Enlightenment

cannot simply be theoretically undone in a return to pre-modern ‘enchantment’—to a

sacralised conception of the world, or to some posited ‘original’ unity with it in unalienated

‘immediacy’. Rather, such a rearticulation, which can accommodate irreversible

disenchantment, calls for the recovery of ‘unalienated life’ from within a non-reified

conception of modernity.

The paper responds to this problematic by contrasting the notion of the contingent

hegemonic status of capitalism elaborated by Akeel Bilgrami, with that of a more

constitutive conception of history (qua historicity), developed in the writings of Heidegger

and Marx. Through this contrast, it suggests that if the non-reified modernist conception

of unalienated life is to avoid the twin perils of a nostalgia for past unity, and of future

immediacy and transparency in pure ‘presence’, it can only take the form of a negative

movement, a universal in perpetual becoming.

3. Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi (Ashoka University)

Life and Time: Reconciling the Manifest and Scientific Images

This paper takes off from the work of the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars who wanted to

reconcile the manifest image that man has of himself with the scientific image engendered

by modern science. Here I consider the two images of time, from the perspective of biology

and phenomenology in the work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Henry. In this paper I

discover through the latest developments in theoretical biology and phenomenology that

both the scientific and manifest images are split internally. This seems to complicate the
 Sellarsian project of reconciliation but as I will show, in reality this demonstrates how the

reconciliation is always already accomplished.

4. Kanchana Mahadevan (University of Bombay)

The Ambivalence of Modernity: Postcolonial and Decolonial Reflections on Indian

Feminism(s) in the Colonial Context

Kant’s equation of Enlightenment with maturity in his What is Enlightenment? has been

critiqued by Foucault and Chatterjee. Both argue against the domineering consequences of

universal rationality and turn to local historical contexts. Despite their hesitations, neither

falls a prey to what Foucault terms as the “blackmail” of being for or against the

Enlightenment. Rather, they regard it as an ambivalent phenomenon. But then there are

differences between Chatterjee’s and Foucault’s “effective histories of the present.”

Chatterjee’s critique targets colonialism, and its vestiges in anti-colonial nationalist and

postcolonial institutions as symptomatic of European rationality’s alien imposition on non-

Western cultures. In contrast, Foucault’s critique operates within the European context to

explore the formation of the subject and state through normalization processes such as

sexuality.

Dwelling on their critiques, this paper argues that Chatterjee flags the colonial dimension

of gender question, unlike Foucault. He depicts how the concept of the “new woman” as

embodying feminine virtues in the sphere of personal relationships emerged within the

formation of Indian modernity through its colonial encounter. The home as a site of such

virtues was protected by the nationalists as the spiritual/inner sphere, against the material

public sphere of alien colonialists. Hence, they characterized Indian women as both

domesticated and educated. Chatterjee describes the unfolding of a “new patriarchy”

during the colonial period through hierarchical essentialist dichotomies of the

home/world, feminine/masculine and the foreign/national.

decoloniality, as two parts of Mignolo’s “conceptual triad” of

modernity/coloniality/decoloniality, namely modernity and coloniality, are addressed by

Chatterjee in the gendered context. Indeed, in this respect Chatterjee even preempts

aspects of Lugones’s arguments for what she terms as “coloniality of gender” in “colonial

modernity.” However, Lugones goes further than Chatterjee in discerning the colonizer as

adopting the privileged position of culture as gender to make the colonized available as

bare nature. Indeed, Chatterjee is closer to Mignolo in upholding the colonizer and

colonized as marked by difference. Lugones critiques such difference as having the danger

of erasing the capacity to speak of the colonized. This is reflected in Chatterjee’s oversight

in not engaging with Indian feminisms during the colonial period. Acknowledging Indian

feminisms of the colonized can resist the linear metaphor of waves to question the

foundational status often ascribed to Western feminism as a project of modernity. This

paper suggests that a shift to Lugones’s “decoloniality of gender” can address these lacunae

in Chatterjee by opening the space for “border thinking” (to use Lugones’s expression) by

Indian feminism(s).

5 Babu Thaliath (J.N.U.)

The Aporicity of Time and Memory: The aporias of time and temporal phenomena

in Husserl’s phenomenology, as identified and explained by Paul Ricoeur

In his magnum opus Temps et Récit, Paul Ricouer diagnoses three aporias of time in

Husserl's phenomenology. Of these, the first aporia is the most decisive, as it serves as the

basis for the other two aporias. The first aporia identified by Ricœur refers to the

retentional and protentional extension of "now" (jetzt), the present. The aporia of the

present has its origin in the contrary conceptions of time by Aristotle and St. Augustine.

The Aristotelian world time, as represented chiefly in the harmonious movement of

of soul – as distentio animi. In Husserl's attempt to extend the punctiform "now" by a

retentional and protentional time-consciousness, Ricœur sees the inevitable aporia of a

fusion of two modally opposed representations of time, namely, movement and stasis. In

my lecture I try to show how the first aporia of time identified by Ricœur can be seen not

merely as an aporia of the present (Gegenwart), but as the aporia of the presentification

(Vergegenwärtigung) of secondary memory, as represented in Husserl's propaedeutic

explanation of the retentional extension of a time-object (Zeitobjekt) in subjective time-

consciousness. The time-object and its intentional in-existence in consciousness, which is

primarily conceived by Brentano in a temporal ‘original association’ and later by Husserl

in retentional and protentional extension, is thereby extended in a mnestic and furthermore

historical framework. It is primarily an attempt to establish the existential autonomy of the

in-existent time-object in consciousness. Memory as an in- existent temporal phenomenon

seems to contradict the tacitly assumed primacy of noesis or noetic construction in

phenomenology and thus illustrate its equally autonomous presentification in

consciousness in the form of a temporal aporia.