Seminar on Signification, Conceptual Structures and Human Existence

To be held on 13th January 2015 at JNU.

Centre for Linguistics in collaboration with Centre for English Studies, SLLCS, JNU proposes to
organize a one-day Seminar on Signification, Conceptual Structures and Human Existence on
13th January 2015. The main speaker of the will be Harjeet Singh Gill, Professor Emeritus at JNU
since 13th January, 2000. Professor Gill who turns 80 that day, through his teaching, research
and writing of academic books and papers has inspired nearly two gnerations of students and
colleagues in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. He opened up a new era and a new
philosophical vision of studying and understanding language, literature and culture, deriving
primarily from the Indian social context and has been able to inspire a large number of students
and researches in various parts of India, particularly Punjab and Delhi.
Professor Gills sustained and systematic orientation in Semiotics began during his days
of post-doctoral research with Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris,
between 1963 and 1969. He imbibed during his research, much of the intellectually stimulating
perspectives on Existentialism and Structuralism that was in vogue in Paris during the 1960s.
After his return to India in 1969, he put to effective practice at first in Panjabi University,
Patiala, and later at J.NU., much of the profound ideas he had learned from the great French
philosophers of the day, Jean-Paul Sartre, Morris Merleau-Ponty, Louis Althusser, Claude LviStrauss, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. He made the study of the
structures of signification in language, literature, and culture (including folk and mythological
narratives) his central concerns in his reaching and research. This unique academic practice
attracted towards him a large number of disciples who did doctoral research with him in the
aforesaid areas. He was Professor of Linguistics and Semiotics in Centre for Linguistics and
English from 1984 to 2000.
From the end of 1980s he developed a more personal philosophical perspective derived
from and rooted in the philosophy of the medieval French philosopher Pierre Ablard. He was
convinced, and rightly so, that Ablard was the harbinger of much of the autonomous
philosophical perspective of Conceptualism that was to emerge in Europe, especially France,
from the time of Renaissance till the modern times. He understood that the discursive
structures which appear to and are experienced by the reader and beholder as structures are,
in fact, conceptual structures that individuals themselves construct in relation to and in the
context of their own lived experience. Gill went on to establish a worthwhile connection
between the Abelardian philosophy of conceptual structures and the Madhyamaka philosophy

and ethics of the Buddhists. The Buddhists, he claimed, while undermining the notion of fixed
signification, laid their emphasis on image-like conceptual structure, which had a strong affinity
with the Abelardian point of view.
The merit of such a conceptualist perspective is that it allows you to reject at any given
point of time the signifying structures, already established in and by conventional intellectual
discourses and practices. It enables us to understand, on the one hand, the cleavages and gaps
between the conscious and unconscious structures of cognition and signification, and on the
other, the dynamic movements in the context of discourses of any tradition. The former
approach takes us closer to the Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalysis, while the latter to the
Foucauldian discontinuities in the archaeology of a given intellectual tradition. In other words,
it takes one to the threshold of the more recent poststructuralist positions.
The seminar is envisaged to foreground all the above issues and submit them to a more
rigorous contemporary rethinking. It is expected to encourage scholars in our own context who
have already researched on the above themes to connect up with their own current intellectual
concerns. It would familiarize the current batches of scholars both in the humanities and social
sciences, to discover Gills paradigms and perspectives, in order for them to identify what of
them would be useful to them. It is also expected encourage future scholars to seek alternative
intellectual trajectories that can radicalize their own modes of scientific and academic thinking.
Scholars who have agreed to actively participate in the Seminar:
1. Simi Malhotra, Professor, Jamia Milia Islamia.
2. Franson Manjali, Professor, JNU.
3. Saugata Bhaduri, Professor, JNU.
4. Ayesha Kidwai, Professor, JNU.
5. Vaishna Narang, Dean, SLLCS, JNU
6. Soumyabrata Choudhury, JNU
7. Anuradha Ghosh, JMI.
8. Saitya Brata Das, JNU.
9. Milind Wakankar, IIT, Delhi (expected).
10. Mukesh Ranjan, JMI.
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