English

From the twisted convoluted mansion of the mind, springs forth the strings of creation.The dark recess, termed as the unconscious which is beyond the reach of voluntary control is the storehouse of our repressed desires, fears, emotions and longings. "Freud and Jung and their school viewed painting as an aid in releasing the cramped and suppressed imaginative fancies of the modern artist" (Anand 25). They are both concerned with what lies behind the façade. The question as to what is going on underneath; with unconscious hidden motivations, symptoms, and neuroses. The unconscious processes seeks an outlet and the painter unwittingly provides them through the medium of his art. This paper is aimed at looking at how painting becomes a reflection on canvas of a person's unconscious self by undertaking an analysis of Salvador Dali's paintings. 1Anand, Mulk Raj. "Section Five: Transition from naïve art to man art" Poet-painter: Paintings by Rabindranath Tagore. New Delhi: AbhinavPublications, 1985. Pg. 37. Print.

The selection of this topic for the dissertational requirements of this program have largely been guided by my experiences of being a student involved in an ongoing process of learning through the last many years of my life. Most pertinently since taking an active interest in what constitutes an education through three years of studying literature, a semester studying philosophy and a year and a half of doing this masters in sociology. While principally this engagement is an activity which bears life in the classroom as well as the seclusion of writing in the evening, an essential aspect of this process has been my involvements with multiple study circles, student groups involved in labour politics and a university newspaper. This peripherally maps the milieus or fields from which I shall be drawing from apart from the University itself. What I seek to investigate and shed some light on are the prevalent and emerging practices in higher education from the perspective of the two prime parties concerned-teachers and students and what their experiences of learning and it's relation to their non-academic life has been. This is sought to be enfleshed within the frame of directive changes sought to be implemented by the UGC and the MHRD in education, as well as a comparative portrayal of public and private institutions and their differing pedagogical trajectories. I was a part of the last batch of students taught in the annual calendar in DU, studying literature at Hans Raj. The semesterization of the calendar has led to marked changes in how it is possible to engage with the syllabus and how to prepare, present, teach and study these courses in a situation where the anxiety of an exam is upon students fresh out of school in the first couple of months of their entry into college. Earlier, we were introduced to how and what say literary studies constitutes, what we could do with it and the importance of such a disciplinary practice in understanding our everyday realities by teachers who had devoted many years of their lives enriching the experience of studying varying aspects, niches and periods of historical and cultural production. This was quite bluntly swept aside with the need to prepare students for an exam almost immediately upon their foray into the discipline. Qualitatively this led to marked changes in how and what it was possible to do between students and teachers in a classroom. Even leaving aside dialogue; there were some fairly absurd rearrangement in how the syllabi was divided with novels, plays and poetry being taught in one semester and their supplementary historical and background readings being taught in another. Essential to what enlivened the course was its chronological trajectory which allowed us students to develop a sense of how these various literary movements related to each other historically and the impetuses and spurs which egged and facilitated the emergence of tropes, genres or themes. The value of this is something not easily expressible without its practice as literature is one of the best ways of understanding a people or a

What I would like to explore in this survey of concepts are a few principle themes which will be employed in the dissertation. The necessity of speaking in an economic idiom was created by the need to be able to effectively link some of the key concerns which were sought to be raised there. Here however I would like to speak at greater ease about how some of these keys have been fashioned. So allow me to begin by apologising for having spoken of the 'employment' of principle themes via a survey of concepts. This was a loose description and it is no more possible for me to truly 'employ' themes in writing as it is for words to become a repository of material value in themselves. There is a tendency today for some of our academic work to be reportive of the concerns of the world, of the fall of markets, of terrorist attacks, of xenophobic cultural nationalisms, patriarchy, poverty, communalism and the sufferings of people in a multiplicity of situations and their struggles through them. The plight of people and our relation to them must effectively constitute a basic and commonly agreed upon ethical minimum. Particularly in times where the fall of the global market in the midst of the election of the BJP led government on whom many were counting on as an impetus to industry and growth. This plight, in the form of its reporting is occasionally in the danger of serving purely per formative functions, in response to another line of argument hence becoming reactionary. I'm certain you may have come across television news debates where oppositional party spokesmen mud sling with incidents of malpractices traded in ascertaining who speaks from whatever notion of the higher ground which emerges from such a process. What I am more interested in however is the productive capacity of philosophy, its immense and rich history of being able to engender a dialogue which furthers a conversation. A constructivism which appears in the work of Gilles Deleuze for example and as I shall attempt to argue, is entailed in the very word 'comrade'. This being the step down genealogy. The word 'comrade' derives from Iberian Romance languages and can mean friend, mate, colleague or ally. A political use of this term as a form of address grew after the French Revolution upon the abolishment of the titles of the nobility such as "monsieur" and "madame". The political form of addressal however also entails, the meaning of collective work. I attempted to explain this in some detail in the dissertation proposal by elaborating how Karl Marx and Adam Smith differ in their conception of exchange value. Briefly, production can only be a social process-Marx acknowledges this and hence thinks of value as socially determined labour time or the duration required by collective labour power to produce a marketable commodity. Adam Smith on the other hand conceives of exchange value as value already in the ownership of someone and the potential value which it may be traded for. A 'comrade' is hence is someone who you work with, in whichever way and to what ends perhaps only you can decide. Here, I think it is important that we clarify what is meant by work. This is significant in an age where the casualness displayed in the appreciation of human labour can be unbearably

A metaphor for reading like all metaphors, would speak of how I imagine myself in the act of reading. An intensely personal experience, my metaphor can't help but be a description of how I relates to it. This however must not be considered a limitation of a metaphor. In fact this is the true liberation of it, for a metaphor is yet the finest tool that would allow you to imagine how I imagine something, reading in this case. So let us imagine for a while together. My metaphor for reading, as I imagine it now is like the satisfaction felt in that liminal moment when I find myself walking from one place to the next, from home to college perhaps and a breeze picks up behind me, unexpectedly greeting me on my way. I continue walking but my mind is no longer with me, in my act of walking to college. It is elsewhere, I am not sure where exactly. With the breeze perhaps, freed by it brief pleasantry, of my mundanities and of with it down the street, and from there I cannot see very clearly, but the road goes on. Reading to me is like that. I think one begins to really read in that moment when one is displaced from the idea that one is reading. That is a beginning. It's a funny experience isn't it, that we find ourselves most involved when we no longer notice that we are involved. I would like to call such a state, extimacy. It is extimate because it is characterized by the very emotional sensitivity which we associate with intimacy, but it is not entirely ours. We are not responding to circumstances, to geographies or people, cultures or concepts in our immediate confronting of them. This encounter is mediated. Mediated by and in language, the very cite of reading. So what is language? I would like to think of it as the road that I was walking on when I was so pleasantly interrupted. Walking that is, with a location in mind, directed towards MCPH and the classes which await me there, walking from my home where I rest and prepare for class among other things. Like the beginning of a book it requires a conscious choice, an intention for me to begin an engagement with the book, with the act of reading. I use the word 'act' consciously here because I do not believe that I have really begun reading, merely in an engagement with the act of it. No enchanted breeze tickles my fancy as of yet, and my mind is still confined to the brute reality of where I am going, a destination, an ending, a death perhaps for that is ultimately what all completion is. I often walk to class on sultry days where the stillness of the air leaves the brute reality of the path I walk on unmistakeable in the inevitability of its destination, bad writing does this. But then again, ever so often, the breeze wafts by. I can never tell when it will arrive but its presence is unmistakeable. I am sure you have felt it dear reader for so enchanting is this presence that its arrival frees my mind, out from its petty immediacy and carries me with it to places far beyond and even behind, into the memories and back alleys which make up the little dreams of our lives .To places and times which exist only in our honest confrontation with that which we as of now still fear to name, that lie in a place we can only see sometimes in the clarity of a vision that good writing occasionally touches us with. A depth born out of a truth felt too dearly by the very emotions that it solicits from us. At this time, and as long as I am within it, the path I walk on and the inevitability of its end no longer bear down on me. I am, in a sense-free.

In speaking of a document such as The Communist Manifesto one cannot but keep in mind a history that is invoked by it and those who have invoked this document and this history to struggle in the present for a different kind of future. The reasons as to what motivates the struggle are not fleshed out in its entirety in the manifesto. What this document does provide however is a statement of means-a strategy to wage a class war which would end in the abolition of bourgeois society. This assignment will briefly summarise what this strategy as formulated in the manifesto is and then look at the Maruti workers strike in India as site in which such a class war is manifested and continuing. The Movement of History and Communist Strategy To understand why the communist strategy is as stated one needs to appreciate a certain understanding of history which drives it. An understanding which sees the 'history of all hitherto existing societies being the history of class struggle'. The manifesto in its first section traces the outlines of this historical process which leads to the existence of class formations as they were in 1848. The period that Marx and Engels write in reference to (19th century Europe) is characterized by an already crumbling Feudal mode of production which is no longer sufficiently productive for the increasing demands of the time. The opening of trade with colonies in America, East-India and China, the proliferation of the means of production, mediums of exchange, and of commodities in general provided an accelerated impetus to the revolutionising elements within Feudal society, which was already straining to supply the growing wants of these new markets. It was these conditions which facilitated the existing division of labour between multiple guilds to be absolved into the division of labour into single workshops. Meanwhile the ever expanding demands of markets facilitated the revolutionizing of manufacturing by its mechanization through steam power. This constitutes the outline of the rise of the modern giant industry. Simultaneously this new mode of production brings with it a new set of relations of production, the place of the industrial middle class is taken over by industrial millionaires 'the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois'. This constitutes a fragment of the history of the development of the modern bourgeoisie, one sees here how the development of modes of production and the expansion of markets enabled their present position as the owners of the modes of production in capitalism. Crucial to the understanding of the dynamic at play here is that this revolutionising necessity in the mode of production which is generated by an ever expanding and proliferating market driven by the laws of capital, necessitates a revolutionising of the conditions of human existence via the hegemonization of the social sphere by the logic of the bourgeois market. Localized cultural resistances are battered down by the 'heavy artillery' of mass produced and cheaply priced commodities which lay the express lines of the bourgeois market into every corner of the globe and into every diasporic population-The necessary step for their assimilation into the bourgeois

Gothic architecture as seen in churches in Europe of the 12th century evolved from the earlier Romanesque architecture. The stoic, stocky fort like constructions of the Romanesque period gave way to the more baroque constructions of the Gothic. The intricate imagery that this transition facilitated in the form of animal iconography as well as their symbolic value is what this paper will seek to discuss. To begin such a task one must first appreciate how it is that the medieval world looked on its churches. What was the point of the intricacy of their craftsmanship and what did it mean to them? Here the idea of a symbol becomes essential. To Medieval Europe the world was a symbol. The forms of things as they appeared were the repositories of the hidden, divine substance. True knowledge, then, consists not in the study of things in themselves—the outward forms—but in penetrating to the inner meaning intended by God for our instruction, for in the words of Honorius of Autun, " every creature is a shadow of truth and life." All being holds in its depths the reflection of the sacrifice of Christ, the image of the Church and of the virtues and vices This extract from Emile Male's The Gothic Image foreshadows clearly the Neo-Platonism that is to come in vogue through ecclesiastical learning during this period. Animal iconographies hence were suffused and carried with them this 'inner meaning' which Male refers to. To understand the meaning in question we must appreciate the symbolic order they drew upon. A prime example of the key to this order would be the Bestiaries. In these books we find a fascinating intermingling of Pagan animal fables alongside mystical commentaries on them by the early Christians (Emile Male, 1958). This is a fine example of the cultural imagination of an epoch in transition as we see an engagement of Christian and Pagan metaphor for the production and interpretation of meaning.

What I propose as a topic for a term paper is an attempt to draw out some of the interstices which have existed in the construction of the most basic of kinship structures in our society, the family and the reproduction of the ideology of the family in popular media and political allegory. A reproductive ideology which in its own way tethers a reproductive practice itself-of not merely family but, as I will argue a political horizon of imagination which seeks its own form of national supremacy. A form of virulent nationalism built upon a linguistic vote bank constituency. Drawing from an Althusserian symptomatic reading of the family as the most preliminary institution of primary socialization and ideological interpellation, I would draw from my experiences of having lived with multiple families over the past 5 years and attempt to sketch how labour has been divided in these households and the relation this may have to the cultural moorings which such a vital site inculcates. It is important however that we do not allow a vestige of formalism to delimit how we are to understand the division of labour in a household for it is primarily the household which serves as the infrastructural site which is occupied and laboured in by people. The family being but one possibility of such a social organization. Over these last five years I have also lived amidst small groups of college students renting flats together in make shift hetro-nuclear residences as well as by myself in rented rooms. Admittedly, such a study would be far from exhaustive given the limitations of my own experience, it is however an intensive study as methodologically, unlike interviews or focused group discussions these are people who I have grown to know intimately and call friends. It is ventured that this intensive study of the division of labour between four families and seven shared premises with flatmates may shed some light on what I believe is a fundamentally important question. The question of how is labour divided and the household organised inside and outside the family, and-what is the difference between how an older and more formally organised generation and a younger and more mobile generation in their cohabitations of domesticity. The methodological concerns here are chiefly operative at two levels 1) the politics of representation and mediation in the construction of narrativization. Here I think Fredric Jameson's book, Representing Capital may be of assistance in being fair to past scholarship which has tried to minutely map the circuits and mediations of capital in its movement in narratives. 2) The process of interviews itself, though it is a limitation of my expression and of time in being able to speak of this as merely interviews, for what I believe I had the privilege of sharing was, at least on fleeting occasions-a collective way of living as a commune and the exchanges which we shared were not structured as such-the best way I can find of describing it is joint activity. Studying, cooking, and caring for the household together. Most interesting to me are the circumstances in which this broke down under the weight of antagonism which were not local yet intimately connected to us as individuals in our relations with a network of people beyond the household. In being able to make this experience communicable I would like to be able to draw upon Walter Benjamin's essay The

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. "The truth will not run away from us": in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.)-Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History, 1919 Origins To begin I think it may be best to circumscribe the contexts and circumstances within which these reflections found spaces to gestate and germinate within. Along the way some of these reflections may offer some insight into the milieus which I have sought, what I hoped to find there and how I have lived. Fresh out of school, and in a new city (Delhi) which I sought out to escape the imagined and real confines of parental cohabitation, the choice of a discipline was what initially vexed my imagination. I was clear that I wanted to study the humanities, being an avid reader of literature throughout my earlier school life. An interest which was nurtured by the happy coincidence of living with two professors in Calcutta while studying for my ISC board exams. These two were my father, Selvyn and an old college friend of his, Mrityun-both were teaching in Universities then and living in what was effectively a bachelor pad, which was both alien and exciting for me who had for the past 6 years lived with my mother, Anjana in Hyderabad. I remember being interrogated in the evenings by these two men over three decades older than me as they nursed their drinks about questions such as the role of the state after a political science class in the afternoon. My initial reticence to engage in such debates was slowly shed away as well as the inculcation of a critical attitude towards textbooks which developed out of the inadequacies I encountered in my understanding when standing up to such scrutiny. My choice of selecting literature as a discipline to study, was finally guided however most evocatively by a classmate who shared my interest in poetry. This was Nishant, we would sit at the back of the class and write poems in between classes, we shared, critiqued and encouraged our poetry between us. A literature student however does spend an inordinate amount of time in solitary reading and my more historical interests generically were strongly guided by studying late modernist prose, particularly Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and the verse of T.S Eliot who I often attempted to imitate in my own poems. The Nebula of Nationalism Conrad however was crucial to me in his ability to give voice to the suppressed archaeological encounter which constituted the dilemma of modernity, the encounter between a rapidly industrializing Europe in its quest for raw materials and markets for its Imperialistic conquest represented in the figures of Kurtz and Marlowe as they grapple and negotiate with

While a significant part of the research for my M.A dissertation draws from memories of living with different families in multiple households a component of it is also derived from experiences of a process of enquiry which in some ways encompasses my most recent travels and re-acquaintances with some old friends; Pranav for example. The segment from my dissertation which would be most pertinent within the paradigms of this course, Relationships and Affinities is a survey of the division of unwaged household labour between different generations not necessarily related within a formalised kinship structure. The framing of such a question however is contingent on the structure of the household itself along with its classed and gendered aspects. These consist not so much as limitations of the question as the very coordinates which enable its framing. Yet how does the experience of cooperative and unwaged labour, the kind which may exist between friends or colleagues, (dare I say comrades?) differ when the modality of the household is altered? Travelling together, particularly via road requires a degree of cooperative responsibility between participants which is significantly different from the mores and organized rhythms which arise in households. Timing and schedule are absolutely contingent on the other person as a spare key makes no difference when there is only one motorcycle. A zone with no question regarding access or prohibition as ignition jump starts a movement which the party is party to. In fact these circumstances are evocative of some of the finer travel literature produced, from The Motorcycle Diaries of Che to Pirsig's cult classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance, and as expansive a domain such as that which is opened by such a genre and the foothills of the Himalayas evokes, for the purposes of this assignment I would like to stick to the organisation of labour. A division not limited to just Pranav and me however, yet a cooperative form of sharing each other's burdens in our differentiated pursuits. We encounter, on every step of our way people from all walks of life, and in seeking and providing what we can do for each other, the tethers of a community slowly emerge. Communities which are not yet constituted are perhaps of greatest interest to us for we actually witness their gestation, often in silence as the misshapen ventures of outliers alert packs to possibilities which existed only as potentialities until they see the light of day. The emergent football fan clubs which have arisen in this country (India) since the advent of television and the proliferation of formalised biker clubs being examples of changes which this generation may one day narrate tales of. Tales which express how differentiated generations experienced and relate the changes of their times to others, and provide insights to how we have lived. To arrive more directly to the point however, a travelling camp of two people and a motorcycle constitutes a mobile assemblage coordinated in this case for an exploratory purpose requiring enthusiasm and organization in equal counts. Our destination was to travel to Harsil valley and trek as far as we could up the hilly banks of the Bhagirathi river. And as much as the mountains and an escape from the city spurred our imagination this was also an alibi to iron out some of the discrepancies which had surfaced in our last excursion to Dharamkot .

The value presented in the work of Baruch Spinoza stands as a testament to itself, yet given the sheer extent of the vexed debates in the fields of sociology and philosophy revolving around politicised 'binaries' such as the man-woman, occident-orient, reason-sensation and perhaps the oldest yet, mind and body-the metaphysics presented in Spinoza's Ethics may today be of value in terms of the opportunity it develops for the possibility of the continuance of a dialogue or colloquium which is perhaps stunted today within and by the vocabularies and discursive practices of disciplinary or political positions. The stunting or the incapacitation of a dialogue, the absence of reciprocation in communication is a question which is of fundamental pedagogical relevance particularly within the classroom-a space which offers the opportunity of a constructive and critical conversation, one not easily afforded in a world and an economy with increasing constraints and regulations on time and spaces. Yet even the initiation of such a dialogue (if it is to become that) requires not merely the time and place but a certain minimum effort, a will to construct one. An effort which is not merely directed at whoever may be addressed but is constitutive of the form which this possible dialogue could take. This brief monograph will try and shed some light on how such an effort is envisioned in the metaphysics and philosophy of Spinoza. Spinoza was expelled from the Jewish community at the age of 23 on account of his controversial views on the nature of the Divine and the Hebrew Bible, his books were placed under the index of the Catholic Church's list of forbidden books. Spinoza lived the rest of his life grinding and polishing optical lenses. The grounds of his expulsion shall not be delved into here in detail as it is not the purpose of this monograph, suffice to say that the prime accusations against him were charges of materialism, immoralism and atheism. Such 'accusations' today may not carry the weight they once did and there has certainly been extended developments in the way in which societal disciplinary measures are implemented as documented in works such as Discipline and Punish by Foucault. Of concern to us presently is Spinoza's own renunciation. A denunciation which forms a keystone in his philosophical edifice, a denunciation of consciousness, values and sad passions (Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze). It is possible to now already see principally the nature of the antagonism produced between him and the Jewish community. The image of an Abrahamic god, with its emphasis on the notion of a transcendent creator and its augmentation of the suffering in life into a parableistic aphorism for the struggle and sacrifice of Abraham was moved away from. Most crucially in Spinoza's equation of God with Nature-which is why he was called a pantheist (the belief that the universe or nature is identical with divinity.) This constitutes a brief sketch of the conditions of Spinoza movement away from Jewish communal life and some of its core theological beliefs as they existed in the Dutch Jewish Synagogues of the 17th century. We shall now touch briefly upon the constructivist

This paper seeks to contextualize the making and unmaking of disciplinary logics and the horizon of questions the may provide insights into within the ambit of student struggles and departmental organizations in higher education in India in a contemporary moment of political turmoil. It seeks to ground this investigation within the working and intellectual life of a student in terms of the social production of the spaces of their inhabitation as well as the andragogic practices immanent to disciplinary logics in trying to further how they may be questioned from within distinct subjective vantage.

What is attempted in this paper is a re-assesment of Derrida's introduction of what has come to be called 'de-construction' to the anglophone world in his address at John Hopkins University in 1966, titled 'Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences', in the light of Marx's elucidation of the value form in it's emergence in political economy over a century earlier (1859) in 'A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy'. What I have tried to show here are the points of encounter and divergence, with particular attention to the translatability of the now starch 'center-periphery' relation in Derrida's 'history of the concept of structure' into Marx's  analysis of the 'commodity form' in its transmutation into the value of money, as Capital. This allows for the raising of the question, or rather the avoidance of the question of 'magnitude' in Derrida's exposition via demonstrating its transmutability as 'value' through processes of production and circulation, in Marx.

The Indian Academic Establishment has systematically banked on the historical phenomena that was Colonialism and turns its gaze away when confronted by the very practices it indicted as 'Orientalism' when practiced by the 'west.' This response seeks to hold accountable the positions and Institutions which facilitated this process via its enquiry into the 'grounds' of the judgements of the apex court of this land and it's relation to empirical findings regarding the allegation of rape, while arguing that India can no longer be apprehended within academia as a nation which defines it's identity in Post-Colonial terms.

Critique in India, in the hands of Left Liberals if often irresponsibly diluted to a juvenile umbrage with the 'discourse' of business communications and an ill sighted yet sustained advocacy of Protectionist policies. This paper is directed to the oversights of such a perspective via the exploration of an encounter between the film maker Michael Moore, and the economist Milton Friedman in their taking up the Ford Pinto case. It seeks to situate this encounter within the context of how disagreements regarding principle are often avoided by left liberals.

This short note seeks to chart the extent and direction of Friedrich Engels project in the 'Dialectics Of Nature' (1883). While summarizing the overarching scope of Engels' insight, liberated from ecclesiastical and academic authorities, I focus on his encounter with the role played by labour in human evolution.

This was my first essay for a M.A. It critically engages with Peter Hamilton's reading of the genealogical moorings of Sociology, while historicizing its genesis between the Renaissance and the following Romanticism. This intellectual history attempts to disentangle the unilateral notion of the Enlightenment invoked by Cultural Studies, Anthropology and Post-Colonial Studies as a harbinger of a totalitarian prescription of mechanical reason. It does this by pulling out the disciplinary threads that wove what was identified as the beginning of a society questioning the foundations of it's beliefs. Threads which were, arising out of the medieval ages - distinctly theological.
It is from within this antagonism that we see the emergence of the philosophical schools that we now identify as French Rationalism, German Idealism and British Empiricism. This unpacking of the Enlightenment allows for a better appreciation of the depth and rigor of thought and discovery that characterized Continental traditions of Philosophy at the time, which were the foundations of modern Social Science.