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Ranjan Ghosh—The Plastic Turn

After the linguistic, hermeneutic, post-structuralist and post-humanist turns, we are now in the midst of the 'plastic turn'. This talk looks into the nature, metaphysics and philosophy of a turn that has impacted both our critical thinking and our discursive and materialist existence deeply and decisively.  Who is this homo plasticos? How has a material in its ubiquity, access, fragmentation and mineralization changed the way we live, exist, act and think? The turn, Ghosh argues, has re-narrated our geo-materialist, psycho-physical and earth-connect in experiences and reflections that are both unprecedented and dramatic. How has this turn formed our ‘plastic-(r)evolution’, the ‘fearful symmetry’ of critical existence, the history of our present?

Ranjan Ghosh teaches in the department of English, University of North Bengal, India and currently Visiting Faculty at Cornell University. His numerous books and edited collections include Presence (Cornell University Press,  2013, ed. with Ethan Kleinberg), Thinking Literature across Continents (Duke University Press, 2016, with J. Hillis Miller), Transcultural Poetics and the Concept of the Poet  (London: Routledge,  2017), Aesthetics,  Politics, Pedagogy Tagore (Palgrave Macmillan,  2017), Trans(in)fusion: Reflections for Critical Thinking (London: Routledge, 2019) and Philosophy and Poetry: Continental Perspectives (Columbia University Press,  2019). Apart from finishing a book on global intellectual history he is also completing a trilogy on plastic: The Plastic Turn & Love in the Time of Plastic & Plastic Figures. This talk emerges out of his book The Plastic Turn and a forthcoming paper of the same title in the journal diacritics.