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The Institute for the Study of Texts is a pioneering, participative network for philosophy and literature. The Institute organises courses and programmes across borders, through videoconference, following a cooperative approach on education and creativity.

The Institute for the Study of Texts opens its virtual doors in early 2017. It aims at bringing together writers, philosophers, artists and students in a pioneering space offering regular evening courses, events and screenings, workshops, critical and experimental publications in poetry, fiction, literary theory, philosophy and film appreciation, and consultancy services in intellectual and creative guidance. Conceived in view of both the general public and the communities of actively engaged artists and writers, it also innovates on the lines of its teaching, organisation and management philosophy, along with its crafting of a new business model for intellectuals and artists.

The IST is a response to the state of affairs of the art and intellectual culture around us — of the existing support systems and environments proposed to creative practitioners and serious students. The fields explored, promoted and expanded at the IST are already present, in part, in our universities, across the official programmes of Languages, Philosophy or Film Studies, but students and teachers both see, too often, their vibrant passions challenged by the weight of rigid structures, where few if any full-scale initiatives are permitted, and where one’s budding curiosity gets directly curbed by utilitarian reductions to the validation of a degree and its anxieties.

Outside the universities, the public space is familiar with literary discussions, writers’ meets and film appreciation events, but these efforts suffer from their respective isolations, besides the arduous tasks of catering and responding to an audience that pays less or nothing, generally unreliable and irregular, and thus finally, only superficially engaged. This virtually total absence of any financial fruits translates further into the impossibility for such practitioners and events to gain access to quality infrastructures, not to mention the fantasy of starting one’s own.

In such a context, the arts are rarely given their chance to demonstrate the seriousness and the unique inspiration they carry for our times. Indeed, caught in these deadlocks, it is finally the formation of quality intellectual and artistic movements that is endangered, as practitioners may be led to surrender to their own isolation and to the depressing impression that their passion is stuck in a blind spot of the popular culture and economy of their times.

The IST plans to bring all these forms of potential energies into a specifically designed organisation, conceived from the start with the rigour of ensuring its economic sustainability — the pivotal key today to become and remain relevant, both to the general public and to advanced art and literary practitioners.

The Name

The Institute for the Study of Texts first recalls the far-reaching travail at the root of all artistic and literary ambitions : study. For the serious theorist and practitioner of art, study is not limited to the few years of schooling and higher education : it is the attitude of patience and humility which alone can give rise to relevant and original responses through the growth of the creative process.

IST is a place of and for study, but not just any study. Insisting on the study of Texts, it is opening several fields of possibilities at once. First, affirming texts as our core objects of study widens the classical frames of intellectual and artistic works. Through this angle, philosophy and literature come together under the same space, and intellectual angles combining both of these across specific themes or authors, become possible and even encouraged. Considering literature and philosophy together, as primarily texts, before any subdivision of contents, it is also laying the grounds for the later explorations of other domains of human, artistic and spiritual expressions till now generally kept out of the humanities. The programmes of the Institute are thus also open to the interpretation of religious or legal texts.

Studying texts, it is considering texts as our primary materials. Each programme and each course is therefore designed to bring text study and text analysis as the main component and method in the exploration of the creative work, and in the development of the learning process. The IST thus offers a response to the tendencies of academics to engage in self-indulgent chatters, where works of literature or philosophy are reduced to endless paraphrases, in fact stepping stones for the teachers’ personal and narrower views. Thus is also echoed in our learning culture the logocentric assumption that creative works should ultimately be reduced to their “spirit”, their “meaning”  and their “ideas” — and such, through a personal interpretative process of which the grids and criteria are often kept hidden from the students. The courses at the IST are designed to present, study and analyse textual materials as the bases for the processes of interpretation and exploration. Each course proposal, submitted by applying instructors, is thus reviewed and developed with the Course Committee, which ensures its customised textual materials for each session, guiding in this process the direction and voice of the interpretative exercise as a whole.

The study of texts is not to be understood as being limited to known and celebrated authors, ancient or modern. Through the Writers’ Atelier, instructors, writers and students of the Institute sit on a foot of equality to study the creative works of one another. Studying seriously one’s texts, and studying closely the texts of one’s contemporaries, are indeed central components to any creative initiative.

Our usage of the term texts does not limit our focus of attention to inscribed works of writing only. In particular, the IST sets Film Appreciation as one of its prime domains of study. Film is thus understood as its own medium, its own text, having each time a proper grammar, a vocabulary, a style, a rhetoric. The programmes in Film Appreciation at the IST undertake the close studies of films, where an attention to the form, to the technique and the aesthetics, come to balance the general tendency to only analyse and expand upon “the message”, imagined to be distinct and finally broadly independent from its materiality. Writers’ Ateliers in film appreciation will also be organised, to provide active script-writers, directors and critics with the opportunity to sit down together in order to explore and improve projects in the making.

Lastly, and playfully, the IST finally evokes the country and culture of its origin in the acronym Indian Standard Time. The time of thought, a space for thinking, at a special space-time for India in the history of the world. It is in the horizon of such a time and its infinite possibilities, that initiatives such as the IST are meant to come up, where a serious understanding of economy, technology and business are paramount to making art and theory more relevant and wide-reaching in society.