SynTalk

SynTalk thinks about the provocative questions of spectres, spirits, & ghosts, as themselves and as signifiers, while constantly wondering if they are an unnecessary residue. Can we think of the repressed voices in places of violence and ruin, using ideas of ghosts and haunting? What is the thing that haunts? What is the big deal about the ghosts? The concepts are derived off / from Plutarch, Ludwig Lavater, Thomas Lodge, Shakespeare, Nicholas Rowe, Heidegger, Freud, Weber, Adorno, Levinas, Tagore, Amos Tutuola, Derrida, Kurosawa, Arjun Appadurai, Stephen Greenblatt, Jean-Michel Rabaté, & Avery F. Gordon, among others. How the juxtaposition of the familiar with the unfamiliar creates the uncanny? Would something entirely unfamiliar be uncanny or just plain strange? Can the spectral be defined at all? How hauntology potentially challenges ontology? Do ghosts represent a world order where things are not arbitrary, and where actions have repercussions? How Shakespeare added a sense of wonder and mystery to the figure of the ghost, & made it substantial. Is Shakespeare’s Hamlet a Protestant with a Roman Catholic father? Should Hamlet have followed what the Ghost said? Are ghosts almost always ethically haunting figures? How the Derridean ghost is a bodyless body, and not a spirit without a body? Is every sense of our Being always haunted (with Nothingness)? How time is ‘out of joint’ with the ghostly. Does the uncertainty of the future always unsettle the past? Does modernity render the unexplainable superfluous, & what then are the ghosts of modernity? Is the cinematic consciousness ultimately a very spectral consciousness? What has been the life of ghosts in (say) Indian, Japanese, & South East Asian cinema? Why do Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists always see more than the others? Can a hyper rational mind experience the spectral? The links between Ur-Hamlet, 49, temporal twist, Macbeth, trauma, Hiroshima, turning table, purgatory, Madhumati, goblin, witches, The Babadook, spectral housing in Mumbai, magic, white noise, & Bhooter Bhobishyot. How the ghost expresses the yearning to grasp the mystery of history. Can we get hold of the Levinasian ‘trace’? Are there cultures without ghosts? Would our (otherwise sterile) lives need the pollution or infection of other worldliness in the future? Is it almost impossible to live without ghosts? ‘Can we speak of ghosts, without transforming the whole world and ourselves, too, into phantoms’? ‘Even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet…’. The SynTalkrs are: Prof. Shormishtha Panja (Shakespeare studies, literature, University of Delhi, New Delhi), & Dr. Suvadip Sinha (philosophy, cultural studies, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities).