Research Network on Dialectics & Society
An International Community of Practice
Jeet Bhattacharya“Nothing happens, no-one comes, no-one goes, it’s awful” Waiting for Godot (1953), Samuel Beckett Thus can be said about history, where things just pass as mere succession of facts. But nothing really happens. For ‘historical materialism’, present is ‘catastrophe’[1]. It is the homogeneous present ridden with ‘status-quo’. Things don’t change; this status-quo is ‘catastrophe’ … Read more
Theme of nature abounds the film of both Ghatak and Pasolini. History is being temporalized through the passing of nature, yet, this transience comes forth with death and filth. Nature is allegorized as myth. In Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958), the car is demolished, the only way for Bimal to get sustenance. Yet it consoles him to … Read more
Death overweighs Beckett’s writing. “Beginning is the end, yet we go on”. The characters are devoid of memory, even if they ‘remember’, it ends up in something they are not definite. The actors resemble something like becoming corpse, accompanied by worn out clothes, grey lights or bare face, peeping out from trash-bins : History seems … Read more
Art’s primary way of becoming art is to appear more than itself, to say, or show something more. To wrest from it, it’s semblance of more, is to question its contingency on which art is dependent. Whenever we determine art in terms of semblance we acknowledge it and at the same time negate it as … Read more