Assured Self Restive Self
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Assured Self, Restive Self
Author: Prasanta Chakravarty
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2023-07-30
The book explores the encounter of the self with situations of crisis from diverse disciplinary and cultural perspectives from antiquity to contemporary times. A crisis is at once a historically situated phenomenon and a recurring idea of endangerment or a breakdown in creaturely living. By making our choices stark and difficult, crisis opens up the possibility for genuinely fresh and unexpected beginnings. At the most fundamental level, crisis is the disintegration of relationality among creatures. In fact, crisis is a battle of attrition with and within selfhood. It has the potential to turn into a norm in everyday interaction. It then stops being an exception and becomes the very condition of our living. Through the rubrics of the assured and the restive, the volume addresses how selfhood encounters and negotiates concentric circles of crisis in life and literature. Does the idea of crisis allow us to formulate the idea of self in a particular way? How do certain sources and resources within the self – stoic or heroic, political and creative – come into being during crisis? While some essays delve into questions of repose and sensuality by highlighting specific cases and trajectories from the subcontinent, others deal with questions of mythology, politics and art in a wider sense. One essay directly addresses the core literary question of the uncanny and its relation to selfhood. While specific concerns illuminate each essay, the volume speaks with a collective, global sense of crisis that faces humanity now and tentatively offers some prospects to deal with it.
Envisioning Voice and the Aphasic Ears
Author: D Venkat Rao
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2025-04-30
This book explores the possibility of using Sanskrit as a basis for rethinking human thought and reflection, challenging the dominance of European intellectual traditions. Sanskrit, with its vast historical spread across Central, South, and Southeast Asia, as well as Europe, offers a unique reflective idiom that contrasts with the European conceptual frameworks that still dominate contemporary thinking in areas such as language, art, reason, justice, and politics. The book argues that European thinkers, despite acknowledging a shared linguistic root with Sanskrit (Indo-European), have followed a very different intellectual path, one that has historically been violent and continues to fuel contemporary conflicts. In contrast, Sanskrit's long history of coexistence with diverse languages, cultures, and polities offers alternative possibilities for understanding justice and coexistence in today's globalized world. By comparing the reflective traditions of Sanskrit with European philosophical and linguistic categories, the book seeks to demonstrate how Sanskrit offers a more inclusive, less confrontational model for engaging with the world. The book engages with Sanskrit texts, European philosophers, and language theorists to substantiate its claims. It argues that such a cross-cultural examination, which brings together the reflective traditions of both heritages, is necessary for a new kind of intellectual inquiry-one that moves beyond the entrenched paradigms of European thought and opens up new possibilities for coexistence and understanding.
Attention and Drift
Author: Prasanta Chakravarty
language: en
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Release Date: 2025-06-30
Brought together, attention and drift help immerse ourselves in our surroundings and make us appreciate the contingent and pulsating relations of living. Attention and Drift suggests that instead of being antonyms, drift and attention are part of the same continuum. Attention is the opposite of being focused or fixated. Similarly, drift is not the antithesis of concentrated action, but the obverse of busyness. Within this zone of juxtaposition between attention and drift, there is also a beautiful and stark tension. There is enticement. And there is waiting. The mode of attentive drift is a poetic insinuation and a complete reorientation of our being, central to all creativity and criticism. The chief protagonists here are two immersed readers of life - George Santayana (18631952) and Stanley Cavell (19262018), whose works and ways of living highlight an involved bringing together of continuities and contingencies of life, appreciation of multiple dimensions of art and a calm display of involved critical faculties. Both seek to assess the relationships between literature, philosophy, art and religion. In each of these domains the two of them celebrate attentive wandering and distractive engrossment at once. In this book we celebrate their passion, involvement, wit, no-nonsense critical acumen and most of all, their ability to love the serendipities of life and creation.