Papers by Tirna Chatterjee
Spectra, 2024
Martin Heidegger deemed boredom as the mood of the twentieth century. Polysemic, yet quintessenti... more Martin Heidegger deemed boredom as the mood of the twentieth century. Polysemic, yet quintessentially affective, boredom is a complex and conflicting experience of different types of emotions. A mix of hope, resolve, exhaustion and melancholia, happening all at once, all the time which can be ascribed to ceaseless mediation and the banalization of the spectacle. Ever since the detonation of the first atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the conception of absolute annihilation has been encapsulated in images, rendering it palpable and consumable for all. The unending devastation of the unfortunate 'other'-the non-European, colonized, marginalized, post/de-colonial, or occupied-has become the accepted norm, and as a result, tediously mundane. The daily ordeal of the 'other' does not arise from a visual fabrication rooted in the value or sentiment derived from photographs, news broadcasts, or tweets. Instead, it is a gradual and ordinary experience of oppression lodged into everyday life. This article will attempt to comment on how advanced technologies that underpin this 'Age of Industrial Complexes' have engendered the contemporary psychological terrains where daily tribulations scrutinize the network of our historical contexts. For the internally fractured posthuman subjects inhabiting today's technologically mediated world, the crux of the matter pertains to the myriad facets of daily life in its diverse forms, locations, and fragments. Additionally, it pertains to the framework of sensory perception upon which these experiences are both constructed and dismantled. The objective is to scrutinize the unhurried and tedious processes involved in unveiling the perpetually destabilized presents that constitute our contemporary reality.
Journal of Boredom Studies, 2024
This paper looks at Kalkimanthankatha, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as an... more This paper looks at Kalkimanthankatha, an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as an aesthetic object where the absurdist postwar 'tragicomic' play becomes an avant-garde film where two protagonists search for the mysterious messianic figure of Kalki, whose arrival, in Hindu mythology, marks the end of one temporal cycle [yuga]. God as absence and the boredom of waiting and non-arrival turns from direct translations of dialogue from the play; discussions on esoteric philosophical dilemmas like the value of inaction; acceptance of the unknowable; and ceaseless search as affirmative to faith; to conspiratorial speak on impending war marked by passages read from Mao's Little Red Book (published 1964) evoking the history of the Naxalite movement. This paper will look at how the a priori acknowledgment of the cyclical rather than linear structure of time ratifies the motif of uncertain and infinite repetition that marks the absurd quality of Beckett's work and ask: does the cyclical promise of the future as regeneration condemn its prospects to an absolute boredom? Does linear eschatology maintain certain circuitous elements-the coming/return of the messiah (in/as the/a future)-that enclose waiting and boredom as a way of life? Are boredom and waiting fundamental threads interlacing eschatological thoughts? Through this film, the paper will ask what happens to 'future/s' when this seemingly unanticipated encounter of contrarian positions and bodies of knowledge take place as sacred/profane, modernity/tradition, aesthetics/politics, linearity/circularity and to see how boredom plays a pivotal factor in shaping such thought, discourse, and understanding.
Zoon Politikon, 2021
This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of ... more This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida’s auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.
Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra (2020) The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience
Film-Philosophy
Zoon Politikon, 2021
This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of ... more This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida's auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.
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Papers by Tirna Chatterjee