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ULAB Debating Club presented a guest lecture, "Job and Justice: The Unconscious in Biblical mythology."
Return to Freud, a recently formed reading group run by ULAB Debating Club, arranged a guest lecture in the ULAB Auditorium on Thursday, April 29, 2010. Dr. Salimullah Khan, a renowned professor of Law presented his paper, "Job and Justice: The Unconscious in Biblical mythology." The presentation addressed the moral, mythological and psychological implications of the Book of Job, a much talked about chapter of the Old Testament, which is often interpreted as ‘a philosophic drama dealing with the problem of good and evil’, in other words, the problem of justice and injustice. The old legend of Job describes a good man of superhuman patience who bore up under great misfortune without ever losing faith in God. The story is retold in the Book of Job. According Dr. Khan the What makes it more interesting is the biblical writer’s ‘own deep poetic probing of the relationship between God and man’ ‘carried like rich cargo within the simple and sturdy vessel’ of the old legend. Having summerized the story Dr. Khan moved on to discuss the distinct philosohical stands taken by the four characters- Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar and Elihu. Although God seems to persuade Job, the central character, in the end of the story with notions of reconciliation, still Dr. Khan argued that a freudian interpretation would find out gaping holes in the process which were proposedly the symptoms of "the unconscious."
In the question & answer session, Dr. Khan responded to the questions and comments from senior faculty members including Professor Imran Rahman and Mr. Zakir Hussain Mojumder as well as from a good number of students with attempts to clearify further the freudian and lacanic positions on the problem. Wafiur Rahman and Adiba Raisa Hussain, student coordinators of the host reading group, called upon members of the audience to join the regular discussion sessions of Return to Freud, which are organized fortnightly addressing a large variety of philosophical, social and literary topics. Professor Golam Sarwar Chowdhury cocluded the talk by thanking the guest speaker and the audience on behalf of ULAB Debating Club. (Dr. Salimullah Khan did his LL. B and LL. M from Dhaka University; MSS and Ph D in Economics from New School for Social Research, New York.) |