Table Of ContentPolitics and Religion
Politics and Religion
Edited by
Saitya Brata Das
POLITICS AND RELIGION
Edited by Saitya Brata Das
© Editor
First Published, 2014
ISBN 978-93-5002-307-5
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Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Contributors 9
Introduction: Thinking without Sovereignty 13
Saitya Brata Das
1. Political Theology without Sovereignty: Reading Derrida
Reading Religion 25
Clayton Crockett
2. Truth and Reason in Religion and Politics 37
Harjeet Singh Gill
3. History and Eschatology: The Puranic Trait in Indo-Islamic
Allegory 41
Milind Wakankar
4. Schelling: Religion and Politics 54
Saitya Brata Das
5. Nationalism, Colonialism and Modern Linguistics 97
Franson Manjali
6. Beyond Protective Discoloration: Ambedkar on
Conversion 130
Soumyabrata Choudhury
7. Politics, Secularism, Religion and the Order of Things 152
Achia Anzi
8. Nagarjuna: The Mystic Dialectician 164
Dhananjay Singh
6 Politics and Religion
9. The Problem of Theatre in St Augustine: Towards a
Philosophy of Use 180
Soumick De
Acknowledgements
The publication of this book financially benefits from the University
Grants Commission under the Special Assistance Programme that is
granted to Centre for English Studies of Jawaharlal Nehru University.
I wish to thank my colleagues at the Centre for English Studies (CES)
for making this possible. I thank Mr. K.K. Saxena of Aakar Books
for bringing out this book in a short time. “Thanks” goes to students
and research scholars of CES for making the conference on Politics
and Religion a big success and this volume is a collection of the papers
presented at that conference—such an unforgettable event. The editor
of this volume, who was also the coordinator of the conference, wishes
to thank Mohinder Singh and Rajarshi Dasgupta from Jawaharlal
Nehru University and Prasanta Chakravarty from Delhi University
for making the conference such an enriching experience for all of us.
April 2014 Saitya Brata Das
Contributors
Achia Anzi teaches Hebrew at the School of Language, Literature
and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi.
Soumyabrata Choudhury currently teaches at the School of Arts and
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He has previously
taught at CSSSC. Kolkata, and has been a fellow at Centre for
Studies of Developing Societies, Delhi and Indian Institute of
Advanced Study, Shimla. His book Theatre, Number, Event: Three
Studies on the Relationship of Sovereignty, Power and Truth was
published by IIAS, Shimla in 2013.
Clayton Crockett is Professor and Director of Religious Studies at
the University of Central Arkansas. He is the author of Deleuze
Beyond Badiou and Religion, Politics, and the Earth (with Jeffrey
W. Robbins). Crockett is also a co-editor of the book series
“Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture”
with Columbia University Press.
Saitya Brata Das was a Fellow at Indian Institute of Advanced Study,
Shimla from 2009 to 2011. Currently he is Associate Professor
at Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He
is associated with the UFR Philosophie, Université de Strasbourg,
France, and with Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, Paris, where
he was Post Doctorate fellow during the academic year 2006-
2007. His first book length study called The Promise of Time:
Towards a Phenomenology of Promise is published from Indian
Institute of Advanced Study, India.
10 Politics and Religion
Soumick De is pursuing his PhD at Centre for Theatre and
Performance Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi. His essay titled Law, Reason, Truth:
Three Paradigmatic Problems Concerning Truth has been published
in Kritike, (December 2013). Soumick is currently working on
his doctoral thesis titled Perversion, Pedagogy and the Comic: A
Survey of the Concept of Theatre in the Christian Middle Ages.
Harjeet Singh Gill, a renowned semiotician and thinker, is Professor
Emeritus of Jawaharlal Nehru University. Some of his recent
publications are: Baba Nanak, Sufi Rhythms: Interpreted in Free
Verse, and Conceptualism in Buddhist and French Traditions. The
last mentioned work is the revised edition of his lectures in
College de France, Paris, as a Visiting Professor in 1998.
Franson Manjali serves as Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics at
Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. After being
awarded doctorate at JNU in 1986, he taught for a year at
University of Delhi, and then went on to pursue two years of
post-doctoral studies in Paris (Paris-4, Sorbonne, and L’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes En Sciences Sociales) where he wrote a monograph
Nuclear Semantics: Towards a Theory of Relational Meaning (Bahri,
1991). He joined the JNU faculty in October 1989. During
1998-99, he had a stint as a Fellow at Indian Institute of
Advanced Study (IIAS) during which his intellectual orientation
veered from Semiotics and Cognitive Science towards the
Poststructuralist philosophies. His book, Literature and Inûnity
(2001), published by IIAS, Shimla, attests to this shift, and
contains texts relating to the works of Lévinas, Blanchot, Derrida
and Nancy. His more recent publications Language, Discourse and
Culture: Contemporary Philosophical Perspectives (Anthem, 2007)
and Labyrinths of Language: Philosophical Investigations (Aakar
Books, 2014) contain essays that explore and analyse issues in
language studies, literature, culture and philosophy from the post-
structuralist and postcolonial viewpoints.
