This page offers a preview of Catalytic Trifles: Some suggestions for Latipac’s next turn, a new work by Abhishek Hazra. Catalytic Trifles is one of the key nodes in an upcoming body of work. It also expands upon two previous works by Hazra. The sections that follow the main video offer some framing context for the work, along with images and a brief excerpt. If you are interested in a non-linear viewing, you can individually access the three chapters of Catalytic Trifles in the third section of this page.
- 1.An overview of Catalytic Trifles
- 2.A brief excerpt
- 3.Three chapters (for a possible non-linear viewing)
- 4.The hinterland of Catalytic Trifles: two previous works
- 5.Some annotated stills from Catalytic Trifles
Catalytic Trifles: Some suggestions for Latipac’s next turn
Lecture performance, single channel video with sound
41 minutes, 19 seconds
Abhishek Hazra, 2026
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An overview of Catalytic Trifles
This new work by Abhishek Hazra is a lecture performance where the performer’s body retreats to the shadows of cartographic traversals or becomes visible only in gestural fragments, while giving over the oral-aural space to a set of amateur enthusiasts of Hegel from Almora. The work can be approached as an idiosyncratic elaboration on the fault lines between Continental and Analytic philosophy and the particularities of reading Marx from the peripheries. Catalytic Trifles is also anchored in the figure of the philosopher G.A. Cohen, and the contradictions of Analytic Marxism, an unusual strand of Marxisant thought that Cohen had helped to initiate.
The hinterland of Catalytic Trifles is situated within Abhishek’s long-standing interest in the worlds of amateur enthusiasts and the affective undertow of debates and fault lines in that contested terrain that can be signposted as Theory/Philosophy. It is also one of the key nodes in an upcoming body of work that attempts to elaborate on two earlier works, An Unrequited Love for the Lagrangian (2018) and Groundplan Perambulations (2020).
Since reading Hegel in the Himalayas had transformed the lives of these enthusiasts, they had felt compelled to enter into an extended epistolary conversation with Professor Buster Latipac, a figure closely modelled after G.A. Cohen. In Catalytic Trifles, Professor Latipac is framed as a well-known Analytic philosopher who denigrated Hegel while admiring the work of a philosopher of praxis who was himself deeply influenced by Hegel. Catalytic Trifles is structured as an exploratory commentary on some of these letters written by the Almora Hegelians to Professor Latipac.
A brief excerpt
Catalytic Trifles: Some suggestions for Latipac’s next turn — a brief excerpt
Three chapters (for a possible non-linear viewing)
It is suggested that a non-linear viewing might be more productive for a second viewing — that is, after the viewer has already engaged with the work once from start to end. In the exhibition context of a gallery, instead of being played on a loop, it is likely that Catalytic Trifles will have multiple back-to-back screenings, with a pause of approximately five to eight minutes between screenings.
Chapter One: Why Hegel in Almora?
8 minutes 12 seconds
The Almora Hegelians are introduced. We get a glimpse of how, after being deeply unsettled by the Himalayan landscape, they turned to Hegel for succour.
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Chapter Two: On the Desire for Being Catalytic
13 minutes 47 seconds
We get a sense of why the Almora Hegelians were so inordinately excited by Professor Latipac and his unusually contradictory theoretical affiliations. The pages of a forgotten manuscript are also rustled up.
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If the video below does not load, open it directly on Vimeo here.
Chapter Three: Reading the Three Letters
19 minutes 6 seconds
We hear excerpts from the letters written to Professor Latipac. We also find the Almora Hegelians carefully preparing the ground for a more difficult conversation with Professor Latipac. The syncline and anticline of coast-spanning flows are also gingerly rehearsed.
This video is best viewed in full-screen mode on a laptop or tablet, with headphones or earphones.
If the video below does not load, open it directly on Vimeo here.
The hinterland of Catalytic Trifles: two previous works
These two video-performances had explored the figure of the amateur enthusiast caught up in their idiosyncratic obsession with a speculative reading of Marx, both along and against the historical grain.
An Unrequited Love for the Lagrangian (2018)
Exhibition details: This was first exhibited in the group exhibition titled In the Open or in Stealth. The Unruly Presence of an Intimate Future. It was curated by Raqs Media Collective at MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2018–2019
Click here for the video ↓
A still from An Unrequited Love for the Lagrangian
It is not widely known that Karl Marx was also an ‘amateur’ mathematician or someone whose efforts in formulating the ‘laws of motion’ for the capitalist mode of production led him to question some of the then-accepted mathematical notions in Calculus. Abhishek’s works have often dwelled on the figure of the amateur enthusiast caught between their enthusiasm and their disciplinary incompetence.
In this performance video, An Unrequited Love for the Lagrangian, Abhishek takes Marx’s mathematical interests as a starting point and elaborates on it further through a mathematically challenged character named Delta. Delta tries to reconcile with the fact that he cannot really be a mathematician even though he adores the abstractions of higher mathematics. Over the course of the performance, Delta’s enthusiasm for mathematics became a site for exploring questions around the politics of Marxist intellectual history and the ontology of knowledge.
Constantly shuttling between speculative fiction and historical facts, such as dismal pronouncements on Marxist economics by various Neoclassical mandarins, Delta’s confessions weave through several interconnected strands in heterodox economics, the high finance worlds of derivative trading, and contemporary debates in the social sciences on the possibilities of a critically informed relationship between quantification and emancipatory politics.
This video is best viewed in full-screen mode on a laptop or tablet, with headphones or earphones.
If the video below does not load, open it directly on Vimeo here.
An Unrequited Love for the Lagrangian · Abhishek Hazra, 2018
Groundplan Perambulations (2020)
Exhibition details: This was one of the key nodes in an interconnected set of moving image and performance works that eventually took shape as Hazra’s solo exhibition at Experimenter, Kolkata
Click here for the video ↓
A still from Groundplan Perambulations
The speculative scenario of Groundplan Perambulations enables one to reflect on the conceptual possibilities that could be latent in those idiosyncratic, seemingly erroneous and waywardly heterodox readings of Marx that amateur enthusiasts of Marx are often capable of.
Groundplan Perambulations is also an attempt to stage an encounter between Marx and Meghnad Saha (1893–1956), the famed astrophysicist and Banglaphone public intellectual. Rather than engaging with those writings of Saha which clearly demonstrate his commitment to socialist planning, Groundplan Perambulations explores the possibility of framing Thermodynamics as a connecting thread. Marx, who was always a serious student of the natural sciences, had engaged closely with nineteenth-century Thermodynamics, a field that emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and whose formulations of work and energy shaped Marx’s own conceptualisation of labour.
Groundplan Perambulations’ central protagonist is Bijaron, an amateur enthusiast of Marxist theory who works as a technician at a thermal power plant. Meghnad Saha’s well-known undergraduate textbook on Heat and Thermodynamics is his constant companion while he monitors the temperatures in the plant’s steam turbines. As he pores over Saha’s text while also dipping into the Grundrisse, Bijaron realises that Saha’s textbook can also double up as a very effective key for analysing and resolving the exasperating difficulties of the Grundrisse.
This video is best viewed in full-screen mode on a laptop or tablet, with headphones or earphones.
If the video below does not load, open it directly on Vimeo here.
Groundplan Perambulations · Abhishek Hazra, 2020
Some annotated stills from Catalytic Trifles
The Himalayan landscape brought these Almora Hegelians to a significant crisis.
The Almora Hegelians took great pleasure in strange activities that prepared them to dwell in Hegel.
A strange, half-forgotten and partially obscured manuscript also surfaces in Catalytic Trifles.
The rotating couple who had aced their production targets were later blessed by a perpetual presence on what rolled out of this studio.