Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 2
The most recurrent – and delightful – materials found in Flaubert’s stories from Egypt are precisely the author’s reflections on the very act of writing. Flaubert basically writes about writing. … But one would not deny that there is also a more humanistic interest in the project of travelling…
Category: EN
Two Frenchmen in the Orient – Part 3
Since I have been abroad, quite a few travelers have gotten in touch with me. Whether friends who had promised (often in vain) to pay me visit, or complete strangers, they show an enthusiasm that reminds me, not without nostalgia, of my early days here…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Introduction
Buddhism and Mimetic Theory ‒ the two far-reaching outlooks on humans and the world have gained an increasing interest in both western academia and popular culture. Buddhism was initially cherished by Romantic Europe for its fantasised nihilistic tendencies, and today, more accurately, for its concern for compassion and detachment, and its philosophical uniqueness: emptiness…
The Language of Foreignness – Introduction
“I could not live in India: I don’t know the language.” Foreign language is for many the first thing to which foreignness is synonymous. Being a foreigner would mean not just living in a foreign country, but more immediately, more stressfully, living in a different and foreign linguistic environment…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.1
Asking a foreigner for a definition of the foreigner is a guarantee of failed objectivity. My status as a foreigner, and further, my particular historical and spatial context, as well as my experiences as a foreigner, necessarily influence my intellectualizations of this situation…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 1
As I have argued in a previous essay-series, one common struggle comes out through both René Girard’s mimetic theory, and Buddhist metaphysics: a resistance to the often unquestioned solipsistic reflexes of contemporary western mainstream culture. It is on the basis of this shared concern that an initial dialogue between the two ought to be set. Correlated to this resistance are both Girard’s and the Buddhists’ skepticisms as to the actual power, and more dangerous risks, of the self-proclaimed ‘primary’ faculty of the enlightened human: Reason…
The Language of Foreignness – Part 1.2.1
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) argues that human life is profoundly marked by its existence in time. The human being (Dasein, “being-there”) is “thrown in the world” (Sein-in-der-Welt), a world which is in time. Temporality is a source of angst and worry since it is the plane of realization of the fundamental incompletion of Dasein…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 2
The attempted correspondence between Girard’s mimesis and the Buddhist interdependence now calls for the unveiling of certain implications. Before dwelling into the realm of ethics, we shall see how, on matters of rationality and reason too, and first, Girard’s theory and Buddhist philosophy seem to be profoundly in agreement…
After Anatta : Towards a Girardian Ethics – Part 3
For Girard, imitation is primal and unavoidable: “There is no solution to mimetism aside from a good model.” For Buddhism, it is interdependence that is universal. As I have argued, imitation and interdependence are but the same thing: imitation is subsumed within interdependence, and perhaps the most common evidence of interdependence is mimesis. So much so that certain arguments can hardly be categorised in one concept or the other…