Politics 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 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the Publisher. Published by AAKAR BOOKS 28 E Pocket IV, Mayur Vihar Phase I, Delhi 110 091 Phone : 011 2279 5505 Telefax : 011 2279 5641 [email protected]; www.aakarbooks.com Printed at Mudrak, 30 A, Patparganj, Delhi 110 091 Price: ` 495 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.