Introduction

GLOBAL CONVERSATIONS: An International Journal in Contemporary Philosophy and Culture
Volume IV, Number 01 (2021): 07-08

Editorial
Introduction
The current thematic issue cover topics of interest in literary criticism, philosophy, andtranscultural studies. Three articles focus directly on the theme of “Calamity and Immunity,”
whereas an article and a translation with commentary draw attention to the contemporary
relevance of two thinkers from the Indian subcontinent.
The opening two articles identify Jacques Derrida’s sense of autoimmunity in reading
two contemporary novels. Yasemin Karaağaç brings to the fore the interrelations ofautoimmunity with hostility and hospitality in Ismail Kadare’s novel The Fall of The Stone City.
The novel, which narrates the events of two successive political contexts in Albania – theGerman occupation during the World War Two and the post-war communist regime – hasproven a prolific resource for Karaağaç to put to work the conceptual instrumentarium of
deconstruction in revisiting the relations, actions, and fate of its main characters.
For her part, Catherine MacMillan focuses on the political sense of autoimmunity,
which she reads throughout José Saramago’s novel Seeing. The novel, which depicts a politicalcrisis after democratic elections, has offered an opportunity for MacMillan to explore potential
benefits and risks from actions of governments addressing such crisis. Employing the conceptof autoimmunity, she keenly shows its convergence with Saramago’s reflective narrative insupport of the need for democracy as a permanent political critique.
The third article also makes use of Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy for purposes ofliterary critique, this time in conjunction with Alice’s Jardine’s feminist notion of gynesis andin a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Novel The Scarlet Letter. Here the concepts of immunity
and autoimmunity are deployed along with those of woman-in-effect, trace, patriarchy,discourse, and phallogocentrism, amongst others, in a joint deconstructive feminist perspective
aiming to identify the sense of life-affirmation throughout Hawthorne’s narrative and thus trace
what Derrida has called ‘the becoming literary of the literal’.
In her article, Priyambada Sarkar offers a comparative discussion of aspects of thethought of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rabindranath Tagore. She focuses in particular on
Wittgenstein’s claim that ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’ and endeavors to identify it in Tagore’swork. In an exposition full of insights, which goes over an admirable amount of the works ofand the research on these two thinkers, Sakar shows that for both of them words fall short ofconveying the sense of value, but that the clarification of this peculiar ‘running against theboundaries of language’ is conductive to the harmony of philosophical and poetic thinking.
The issue ends up with a selection of the songs of Lalon Fakir, the Bengali poetphilosopher from the 19th century, translated and with commentary by Sayed Muddashir
Hossain. Lalon’s songs are unique and remarkable in many ways, as has been also his life story.
Today’s reader will be able to find in them that, among other things, questions about religion,

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Volume IV, No. 01/2021

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gender, and social equality, which are major concerns of our time, were raised so keenly andlong ago by this brilliant – at once poetic and philosophic – mind. Hossain’s commentary isvery informative, proving truly useful in grasping the sense of Lalon’s unique metaphorics.
We hope you enjoy these pieces and find in them something to benefit from. Thank you
for your time!

Rossen Roussev

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