The Public Intellectual

Deadline for submission of abstract: 30th March 2016
Deadline for Submission of full paper: 30th May 2016

Theme Description

This volume will explore two visions of the intellectual seemingly at odds with one another: the autonomous versus the committed intellectual. Intellectuals have been criticized often for being detached from the everyday concerns of their fellow human beings. Although they are capable of playing significant, and in some cases, decisive roles in the modern world, most intellectual interventions in the present day are carried out from a position of relative autonomy. The image of the intellectual as an independent and relatively autonomous person has exerted a powerful influence in twentieth century critical thought. A prominent advocate of this position was Julien Benda who idealized and sublimated the detached status of the intellectual devoted to the pursuit of universal principles such as justice and truth.

A remarkable and stern exhortation to abandon this so-called position of intellectual autonomy is found in Antonio Gramsci, when he says that individualism “is merely brutish apoliticism, [and] sectarianism is apoliticism.” For Gramsci, the concept of autonomy was deficient in substance. He connected autonomy with idealist philosophy and construed it as “the expression of that social utopia.”

Others have struggled with the conflicting demands of the two positions. Theodore Adorno was less prepared to reject any concept of autonomy altogether, because the “notion of the free expression of opinion, indeed, that of intellectual freedom itself in bourgeois society” always has “its own dialectic.” In Pierre Bourdieu’s view, “the intellectual is constituted by intervening in the political field in the name of autonomy and of the specific values of a field of cultural production which has attained a high degree of independence with respect to various powers.” The tension between Gramsci’s rejection of the concept of autonomy and Adorno’s qualified place for it is also visible in the thinking of Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky and Edward Said who likewise have expressed their own unique and differential conceptualizations on the role of intellectuals. Edward Said, for example, borrows ideas from these various antagonistic positions in order to formulate his own ideas on the intellectual as “exile and marginal, as amateur, and as the author of a language that tries to speak the truth to power.’

Against the backdrop of these definitions and conceptualisations on the status, role and responsibilities of the public intellectual, we invite original research papers largely upon, but not limited to the following sub-themes:

Autonomy of the intellectual
Commitment of the intellectual
Responsibility of the intellectual
Intellectual as exile
Amateur and professional intellectual
Intellectual’s vocation of speaking truth to power
Organic and traditional intellectual
Ideology and the intellectual
Climate change and the intellectual
The dalit intellectual
The female intellectual
Hegemony and the intellectual
Civil society and the intellectual
Marxism and the intellectual
Nationalism and the intellectual
The language of the intellectual
Edward Said’s notion of the intellectual
Antonio Gramsci’s idea of the intellectual
Noam Chomsky’s concept of the intellectual
The Marxist intellectual
Intellectuals and affect
The public intellectual in India
Modernity and the intellectual
The specular intellectual
The liminal intellectual
The intellectual as comparatist
Knowledge, power and the intellectual
The intellectual and the crisis of representation
Arundhathi Roy as a public intellectual
Intellectual and the cultural capital

For submission and other queries, please email/contact:

Dr. Prasad Pannian
Editor, Humanities Circle
Central University of Kerala
Vidyanagar PO, Kasaragod
Kerala, 671123, India.
Phone: 9446460202 (cell)

prasadpannian@gmail.com
humanitiescircle@gmail.com