Author: M Muralidharan
Publisher: Current Books
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 363
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8126406674
Description
The discursive geography of Upanishads charted in this stimulating work of M Muralidharan deconstructs the standard oppositions of intellectual history: materialism vs idealism, subjective vs objective and transcendental vs immanent.
In an exhaustive review of the Indological, nationalist, marxist and post-marxist literature on Upanishads, Muralidharan exposes the tendency to reproduce the stereotype of the orient persisting in them.
Through an elaborate study of the textual domain of Upanishads, rich in detail and penetrating in analysis, this work captures hitherto unrevealed, heterogenous orders of discourse.
Philosophising-certainly its otherworldly variety-was seen not as an activity but as very much an attribute of the Indian mind. A Slight Twist to this left-handed compliment was sufficient to make this sound like some kind of a disease; not intrinsically different from wool-gathering. We should know that these were part of a whole set of oppositions within which orientalism operated, fundamental to which was the one between East and West.
Contents
CHAPTER I: REVIEW OF SECONDARY WORK
Orientalism
Nationalist Response
Post-Nationalist Work
CHAPTER II: PROBLEMS OF THEORY AND METHOD
Ideology, class and Causation
Specificity as the Mirror of Production
Text, Discourse, Discursive Formation
CHAPTER III: TEXT, CONTEXT
The Period of the Texts
Self-Referential Techniques
CHAPTER IV: THE DISCURSIVE GEOGRAPHY OF THE UPANISHADS
Knowledge and its Agents
The States of Being
Death as Limit
Objects
South and Sense
Redistribution, Displacement
Inversion, division
The Subject
Truth
Structures
Inscriptions on Being: Towards a Cartography
Attributes
Negations, Oppositions and their Beyond
Pre-Ontological Strategies
Pre-Epistemological Strategies
Discourse, Society
Summing Up
CHAPTER V: ASCETICISM: DISCURSIVE AND NON-DISCURSIVE PRACTICES
Terms, Discontinuities, Concepts
The Discourse of Asceticism
Non discursive aspects of Asceticism
Other Disciplines, Other Practices
CHAPTER VI: IN GENERAL
BIBLIOGRAPHY