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Seminar on Signification, Conceptual Structures and Human Existence Venue Committee Room, SLL & CS, JNU Time: From: 10.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on 13th January 2015 at JNU Centre for Linguistics in collaboration with Centre for English Studies, SLLCS, JNU proposes to organize a one-day Seminar on Signification, Conceptual Structures and Human Existence on 13th January 2015. The main speaker of the Seminar will be Harjeet Singh Gill, Professor Emeritus at JNU since 13th January, 2000. Professor Gill who turns 80 that day, through his teaching, research and writing of academic books and papers has inspired nearly two generations of students and colleagues in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. He opened up a new era and a new philosophical vision of studying and understanding language, literature and culture, deriving primarily from the Indian social context and has been able to inspire a large number of students and researchers in various parts of India, particularly Punjab and Delhi. Professor Gill's sustained and systematic orientation in Semiotics began during his days of post-doctoral research with Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris, between 1963 and 1969. He imbibed during his research, much of the intellectually stimulating perspectives on Existentialism and Structuralism that were in vogue in Paris during the 1960s. After his return to India in 1969, he put to effective practice at first in Panjabi University, Patiala, and later at J.N.U., much of the profound ideas he had learned from the great French philosophers of the day, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Louis Althusser, Claude LéviStrauss, Jacques Lacan, A.-J. Greimas, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. He made the study of the structures of signification in language, literature, and culture (including folk and mythic narratives) the central concerns in his teaching and research. This unique academic practice attracted towards him a large number of disciples who did doctoral research with him in the aforesaid areas. He was Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics in Centre for Linguistics and English from 1984 to 2000. From the end of 1980s he developed a more personal philosophical perspective derived from and rooted in the philosophy of the medieval French philosopher Pierre Abélard. He was convinced, and rightly so, that Abélard was the harbinger of much of the autonomous philosophical perspective of Conceptualism that was to emerge in Europe, especially France, from the time of Renaissance till the modern times. He understood that the discursive structures which appear to and are experienced by the reader and beholder as structures are, in fact, 'conceptual structures' that individuals themselves construct in relation to and in the context of their own lived experience. Professor Gill went on to establish a worthwhile connection between the Abelardian philosophy of conceptual structures and the Madhyamaka philosophy and ethics of the Buddhists. The Buddhists, he claimed, while undermining the notion of fixed signification, laid their emphasis on image-like conceptual structures, which had a strong affinity with the Abelardian point of view. The merit of such a conceptualist perspective is that it allows us to reject at any given point of time the signifying structures, already established in and by conventional intellectual discourses and practices. It enables us to understand, on the one hand, the cleavages and gaps between the conscious and unconscious structures of cognition and signification, and on the other, the dynamic movements in the context of discourses of any tradition. The former approach takes us closer to the Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalysis, while the latter to the Foucauldian 'discontinuities' in the archaeology of a given intellectual tradition. In other words, it takes us to the threshold of the more recent poststructuralist positions. The seminar is envisaged to foreground all the above issues and submit them to a more rigorous contemporary rethinking. It is expected to encourage scholars in our own context who have already researched on the above themes to connect up with their own current intellectual concerns. It would familiarize the current batches of scholars both in the humanities and social sciences, to discover Gill's paradigms and perspectives, in order for them to identify the ideas and thoughts that would be useful to them. It is also expected encourage future scholars to seek alternative intellectual trajectories that can radicalize their own modes of scientific and academic thinking. Colleagues who have agreed to actively participate in the Seminar: 1. Simi Malhotra, Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia. 2. Franson Manjali, Professor, JNU. 3. Saugata Bhaduri, Professor, JNU. 4. Ayesha Kidwai, Professor, JNU. 5. Vaishna Narang, Dean, SLLCS, JNU 6. Soumyabrata Choudhury, JNU 7. Anuradha Ghosh, JMI. 8. Saitya Brata Das, JNU. 9. Milind Wakankar, IIT, Delhi (to be confirmed) 10. Anil Bhatti, Professor Emeritus, JNU ****