Papers by Debashish Banerji
Critical Posthumanism and Planetary Futures, 2017
The original version of the book was inadvertently published without the biography of "Francesca ... more The original version of the book was inadvertently published without the biography of "Francesca Ferrando" in FM "List of Contributors". The book has been updated with the change.
Quantum and Consciousness Revisited, 2024
After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the qu... more After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 40s, with the imminent approach of independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighboring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, two Muslims and a Dalit. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of "the outside" in a millenia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted though that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively in three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.
Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2020
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Jun 1, 2012
This paper looks at the ongoing debate between perennialism and pluralism in religious studies an... more This paper looks at the ongoing debate between perennialism and pluralism in religious studies and considers the category of the integral, as described by Sri Aurobindo in the context of this debate. After exploring the case for perennialism vis-àvis pluralism, it compares the contemporary taxonomy of a perennial core to mystical experience developed by Robert K. C. Forman with the idea of the "triple transformation" developed by Sri Aurobindo as a way to the realization of an "integral consciousness." Through this consideration, it indicates the aporetic nature of an integralism which can simultaneously uphold the concerns of perennialism and pluralism non-reductively. Such an aporetic goal challenges the epistemological assumptions of the modern knowledge academy and is shown to make sense only as an ever deferred processual ontology as against the knowledge academy's telos of a totalistic structuralism.
Springer eBooks, 2016
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this p... more The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Sophia, Dec 1, 2019
Philosophical Posthumanism is a recent area of scholarship which Francesca Ferrando has introduce... more Philosophical Posthumanism is a recent area of scholarship which Francesca Ferrando has introduced in her eponymous book. The author situates the subject as one closely related to Critical Posthumanism and Cultural Posthumanism. She also discusses its close relatives such as Transhumanism and its forebears such as Antihumanism and Poststructuralism. The present article is a discussion of Ferrando's text, tracing its lineages and relating it to the ideas of thinkers such as Frederich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Sri Aurobindo.
This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern ... more This critical volume addresses the question of Rabindranath Tagore\u27s relevance for postmodern and postcolonial discourse in the twenty-first century. The volume includes contributions by leading contemporary scholars on Tagore and analyses Tagore\u27s literature, music, theatre, aesthetics, politics and art against contemporary theoretical developments in postcolonial literature and social theory. The authors take up themes as varied as the implications of Tagore’s educational vision for contemporary India; new theoretical interpretations of gender, queer elements, feminism and subalternism in Tagore\u27s literary and social expressions; his language use as a vehicle for a dialogue between positivism, Orientalism and other constructs in the ongoing process of globalization; the nature of the influence of Tagore\u27s music and literature on national and cultural identity formation, particularly in Bengal and Bangladesh; and intersubjectivity and critical modernity in Tagore’s art. This volume opens up a space for Tagore’s critique and his creative innovations in present theoretical engagements.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1052/thumbnail.jp
Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and suprament... more Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) envisioned the exceeding of human limits in an overmental and supramental being as part of our contemporary destiny. This cosmic and transcendental subjectivity, achievable by transformative praxis, was seen by him not as an escape from mainstream life but as the condition for a new kind of society, that may be thought of as utopian. However, almost 65 years since his passing, what we see more pervasively around us is another kind of Utopianism, that of technocultural transhumanism. The technical intervention infiltrates our contemporary lives to an extent undreamed of, so as to be thought an integral ubiquity, turning us into posthuman subjects through an independent destining, beyond our will. Confronted by this regime, are there any forms of praxis open to us, or is (post)human subjectivity necessarily an adjunct to a global production and consumption desiring machine? Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) was a French philosopher who theorized the co-constitution and co-evolution of human and technical milieus with relational possibilities that may provide a new language of praxis that engages the trajectory of cosmic individuation through technicity. This talk will revisit the utopian project of Sri Aurobindo in a contemporary technical key by aligning his ideas of subjective evolution and transformative praxis with those of Simondon
The turn of the 19 th /20 th centuries saw a number of philosophers of conscious evolution emergi... more The turn of the 19 th /20 th centuries saw a number of philosophers of conscious evolution emerging from different cultural backgrounds. This paper argues that this phenomenon, which has sometimes been seen as a philosophical consequence of Darwin's evolutionary theory in the life sciences, is more importantly related to the enhanced scope of human subjectivity made possible by technology at this time. Yet technology remains the "unthought within the thought" of its times, an ambiguous presence, derided for its alienating effects and praised for its enhancement of human capacities and comforts. A later generation of thinkers, belonging to the post World War II era renews the thought of conscious evolution, now in engagement with new technologies of a planet spanning scope. This essay considers the ideas of these two generations of thinkers, focusing on Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) from the earlier generation and Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989) from the more recent era, questioning the consequences of contemporary technology in their thoughts, goals and practices. In developing the historical continuity of ideas, it tracks the question of technology from the earlier to the later generation, highlighting the understanding of both its promise and its ills and engaging with it the possibilities of conscious evolution.
Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall o... more Contours of Modernity was an exhibition of contemporay Indian Art held at the Founder\u27s Hall of SOKA University in Aliso Viejo, CA. from Feb.1- April 1 2005. The catalog features fine prints of the 39 paintings exhibited. These paintings are representative of works from the 1970\u27s to the present by twenty leading artists from India and of Indian origin. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Southern California, displayed works by major contemporary Indian artists including celebrated founders of modern Indian art such as M.F. Husian, S.H. Raza, F.N. Souza, Ram Kumar, Ganesh Pyne, Ramananda Bandyopadhyay and G.R. Santosh, younger leading contemporaries such as Rameshwar Broota, T. Vaikuntham, Anjolie Ela Menon, Vasundhara Tewari, Surender Kaur, Bikash Bhattacharjee, Sohan Qadri, Anjan Chakrabarty,Biswarup Datta and Paresh Maity and diasporic artists such as Allan DeSouza, Sudha Achar and Amrita Banerji. The catalog carries an excellent histrorical oveview and contextualization of contemporary Indian art by the curator and biographical sketches of the artists. The text brings out the intent of the curator to promote an international dialog with modernity, with its critical dimensions of displacement of culture, technological alientation, commercialism, mass conditioning, globalization and future possibilities; and the prints stimulate an intellectual and visual experience with a sense of socio-cultural affirmation, syncretic spontaneity for life, hope and regeneration and provide approaches towards understanding new ways of being modern in a global world.https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1051/thumbnail.jp
“Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of ... more “Evolutionary spirituality” is quite fashionable nowadays in the Bay area, and so is the idea of integral consciousness. But few people actually know the roots of these concepts in the writings of Hegel, Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser and especially Sri Aurobindo, and Haridas Chaudhuri, co-founder and the first president of CIIS. Weaving through these personalities and the disciplines of evolutionary philosophy, transpersonal psychology and cultural anthropology, this will be a talk and open dialogue about evolution in consciousness and culture
This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of th... more This volume provides a revisionary critique of the art of Abanindranath Tagore, the founder of the national school of Indian painting, popularly known as the Bengal School of Art. The book argues that the art of Abanindranath, which developed during the Bengal Renaissance in the 19th/20th centuries, was not merely a normalization of nationalist or orientalist principles, but was a hermeneutic negotiation between modernity and community. It establishes that his form of art-embedded in communitarian practices like kirtan, alpona, pet-naming, syncretism, and storytelling through oral allegories-sought a social identity within the inter-subjective context of locality, regionality, nationality, and trans-nationality. The author presents Abanindranath as a creative agent who, through his art, conducted a critical engagement with post-Enlightenment modernity and regional subalternityhttps://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/facultypublications/1050/thumbnail.jp
Acta Psychopathologica, 2017
Post-Enlightenment philosophy, which is largely creative of and dominates the modern consciousnes... more Post-Enlightenment philosophy, which is largely creative of and dominates the modern consciousness, has defined humanism in terms of rationality and its control over the irrational. This has led to our technological age but has also spawned counter philosophies critiquing the limits of reason and the epistemic possibilities of experience and intuition. Sri Aurobindo Ghosh (1872-1950) was an Indian thinker who was schooled in England and arrived at a cosmopolitan grasp of modernity, including the ideals of the Enlightenment and its limitations. Looking to the discursive and experiential traditions of India, particularly those of the Upanishads (Vedanta) he sought for hermeneutic keys to address the human possibilities of knowledge. In his reading of the Upanishads, he saw a fundamental division between Knowledge (Vidya) and Ignorance (Avidya) and a practical tradition (yoga) which negotiated this division by rejecting worldly or relative knowledge (Avidya) for a Knowledge-by-identity (Vidya). Whereas such a transcendentalism had been idealized even within the counter-movements of the Enlightenment as "the Eastern Enlightenment," Sri Aurobindo sought traces of an intuitive mediating consciousness which would enable a new kind of worldly knowledge based in Truth-Seeing (darshan) and Hearing (sruti). He has referred to this knowledge project as "building an intuitive mentality," a transformative process based on Vedantic knowledge and leading more to an integral consciousness than what we would call a mentality. Looking for the operations of absolute Knowledge in the Vidya that translate to operations of relative knowledge in the Avidya, he located four forms of intuition that could be cultivated and normalized towards the end of preparing such an intuitive consciousness and leading ultimately to an integral consciousness foundational to a divine collective life on earth. In this paper, I will outline these operations of knowledge and discuss the processes by which Sri Aurobindo sought to bridge our human "rational ignorance" (Avidya) to the integral knowledge (Vidya) spoken of in the Upanishads.
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd eBooks, Mar 7, 2014
SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd eBooks, Mar 7, 2014
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Papers by Debashish Banerji
To enable the restoration and flourishing of the ecosystems of the biosphere, human societies need to be reimagined and reordered in terms of economic, cultural, religious, racial, and social equitability. This volume illustrates transformative paradigms to help foster such change. It introduces new principles, practices, ethics, and insights to the discourse. This work will appeal to students, scholars, and professionals researching the ethical, moral, social, cultural, psychological, developmental, and other social scientific impacts of religion on the key markers of sustainability.