“Khushia” is a short story written in 1940 by Indian novelist Saadat Hansan Manto. The story revolves around a pimp, Khushia, who finds himself destabilized after a brief exchange with one of his prostitutes. Behind the relatively common theme of prostitution, it is masculinity, its foundation and its doubts that Manto critically addresses in this short story…
Author: Samuel Buchoul
In the mid-19th c., when Karl Marx announced, in the Communist Manifesto and later in his Capital, the emergence of strong movements of revolt by the working class in industrialised England, France and Germany, he certainly did not imagine that the first cases of such uprisings would actually take place far away from Western Europe…
The Non-Self of Girard – Introduction
According to Girard, the Mimetic Theory and philosophy can’t go together; the Mimetic Theory must go beyond philosophy. More than an ideological disagreement, there is here an actual methodological divergence. Philosophy, he argues, tends to remain at the superficial level of pure intellectual understanding, while other human faculties must be accessed in order to overcome the illusions of an independent desire…
The Non-Self of Girard – Part 1
Anattā is one of the unique contributions of Sakyamuni Buddha, the founder of Buddhism who lived in the fifth century BCE in India. Along with his rejection of the caste system and of the practice of sacrifice, Buddha questioned the existence of the Ātman (Sanskrit) or Atta (Pāli), the self or soul widely accepted in Brāhmaṇism.
The Non-Self of Girard – Part 2
Girard’s comments on Buddhism have been, through his long career, quite sparse. This is understandable: even though particular readers have sensed a possible connection between Mimetic Theory and Buddhism, the topic was probably not one of his main interests. Besides, he minimised this tradition by describing it as a rather morbid soteriological system, which allegedly consists, in his own words, in a “renunciation” led by an intent to get “out of the world altogether”…
The Non-Self of Girard – Conclusion
Following Buddha’s statements about abstract postulations, I would argue that it is not the extent to which our brain can grasp hypothetical views on fundamental metaphysics, but what this brings to our practical embodied life, which must be placed as the end goal of intellectual initiatives. The question is not whether Girard would agree with a metaphysics without selves…
The teachings of the Buddha (5th-6th c. bc) and of later thinkers following his ideas, are usually seen as forming one of the families of Philosophy in India. But is Buddhism a Philosophy? This claim is not as obvious as we usually think…
In “Women,” the fourth chapter of her The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia attempts a focus on the misadventures of the feminine gender during and after the Partition. It is actually a mise en abîme, within a book, which is already mostly a representation of women and their centrality in that event…