Language and Culture: Essays in Honour of Franson Manjali

The problematic of language is one of the fascinating questions that contemporary philosophical discourses – as much as literary and cultural studies – are concerned with. Taking the problematic of language as point of departure, these discourses raise some of the most profound questions of our time: of the very possibility of the political and the ethical in the face of evil and violence that are manifest today; the exigency to exit from various totalities that haunt our contemporary world in the name of identity-politics and how the issues of language feature therein; the relation between language, law and justice; the relations that language has with time and history; and how language opens up, beyond dialectical oppositions that can be subsumed within the law of the same, the very possibility of addressing the other without reducing the other to the same; and how the negativity that constitutes and deconstitutes the fecundity of language at once interrupts the mythical foundations on which worldly hegemonies establish themselves; and how language opens up the very possibility of being-with each other in ways which are at once non-totalizable. The essays collected herein – in honor of Franson Manjali, the former professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and a distinguished scholar – address these fundamental questions of our times by taking up the problematic of language in ways that go along with and at the same time also go beyond formalistic analysis of the properties of language. One of the most important thinkers of our contemporary times in our context, Professor Manjali’s tireless investigations into the problematic of language have opened up some of the deepest questions of our time, questions that cannot be posed within any formalistic analysis of language.