Monthly July 2016
| MONTHLY JULY 2016 |
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The heat has finally gotten to us, and you’ll be surprised to realise how all kinds of high temperatures can freeze you. I guess it was meant to reach the boiling point, as the stew had been simmering for long enough, each of my words a spot on my skin, waiting for the dirts and deposits to spurt out of me. If existentialism evolves as a promising philosophical path for the question of foreignness, it is because numerous are the personal accounts of foreignness which have invited to transcend the very possibility of conceptualisation altogether. Foreignness as an event or a duration demands another language, another discourse than that of a universalising philosophy. The medium of creative, speculative and poetic hypotheses, perhaps ; or at least, the language of an interrogative subject, facing the task of philosophy just like he faces the foreign land, modest yet constructive in his attempt to elaborate upon his intuitions.
A language that forgets its definition, oblivious to its content ; a language eager to go all in continuously, each utterance culminating all it has been so far and still willing to risk it all. A language of creative and poetic hypotheses — or thus spoke my flow some two springs ago, but it strikes me now that the play of the paper, the pleasure of the letters would not suffice for an existence. Keeping this spirit, certainly, maintaining the same intolerance for self-indulgence, but translating it into life, lifestyle, values. Words, those we speak, and actions. Behind the play of my words was my self hiding, indeed a player, improvising decisions and behaviours, for entertainment’s sake more than for any real ideal of aesthetics or creative liberty.No — and indeed, creativity and a continuous attention are required, but these may be put to use for elsewhat than timepassing. Somewhere in the thesis, I wrote that the (western) foreigner bursts his existentialist bubble when he “enters history”, finally understanding the word ‘politics’ and discovering the buried guilts of his people — and perhaps that was my own way to move towards the heavy but liberating realisations of my own history and responsibilities. Control and agency, horizons of our adulthood, are finally a bit like the Socratic paradox : the more you get there, the more you realise it still isn’t in your hands. And thus if little to none is read or written these days, I keep in mind that in any case, even the freest time and brightest creativity would only place me out there : waiting for the words to channel through my mind and fingers, as if waving the hand at my soul, smiling, finally relieved. Samuel |
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| SAMVRITI MONTHLY ・ JULY 2016 | |||
| ESSAY SERIES | |||
| In-Finir | 9 May 2014 | ||
| Foreigner, There : History of a Political Capture | 9 May 2014 | ||
| Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness | 9 May 2014 | ||
| De l’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics | ||||
| EXPLORE THE SERIES | ||||
Introduction In-Finir |
Book 1 Foreigner, There : |
Book 2 Foreigner, Here : |
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Book 3 Us, Foreigners : |
Book 4 Beyond The I’s : |
Overture An Addressee’s Resolution |
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| In-Finir | ||
| 9 May 2014 | ||
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In the beginning, there never was the foreigner. Foreignness is not in nature. No animal has ever been foreign. It is not a quality in the old sense of the word ; it describes an entity neither in its physicality nor in its inner features. Foreignness is more than cultural : not only nature is altogether bereft of foreignness, but any particular human culture would also, surely have the same pretension, in the fantasy of its autonomous genesis. In certain countries of the world, it is impossible to be born a foreigner, and in others, it is the years till adulthood that shall resolve and rectify this abnormality. Foreignness is trans-cultural, at best ; the fruit of a humanity that has consistently turned towards the passions of the political, from its proto-form in the exclusive communities of small scales, to the normative and generic model of the nation-state that obsesses us today. The foreigner would be, more than a faraway offspring of a history of the cosmos, the result of a variety of minute turns in the evolution of human societies. There would be nothing fundamental in foreignness. . . . |
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| READ THE ESSAY | ||
| Foreigner, There : History of a Political Capture | ||
| Book 1 from De l’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics |
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The fact is surprising and saddening : philosophy, social sciences and the humanities had to wait for the late 1980s, just twenty-five years ago, for the first major study of foreignness. Julia Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves (1988) had to start the work from scratch : it opens the field, first, by tracing the lines of a history of the conditions and treatments of foreigners in the larger history of Europe and the West. The blame is certainly to be put on an intellectual tradition, or rather, an intellectual inclination, which did not attempt any encyclopaedic project of a cumulative history of foreigners, not to mention the philosophical ambition of an unpacking of the concept of foreignness altogether. |
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| EXPLORE THE SERIES | ||
| Introduction | Part 1 |
| Stories from a History | Foreigners of the Antiquity |
| Part 2 | Part 3 |
| The Foreigner Enters Reason (1500-1800) | Centripetal Foreignness (1800-1920) |
| Foreigner, Here : Existentialist Foreignness | ||
| Book 2 from De l’Infini : A Foreigner’s Metaphysics |
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If existentialism evolves as a promising philosophical path for the question of foreignness specifically, it is, precisely, because numerous are the personal accounts of foreignness which invite to transcend the very possibility of conceptualisation altogether – foreignness as an event or a duration demands another language, another discourse than that of a universalising philosophy. The medium of creative, speculative and poetic hypotheses, perhaps ; or at least, the language of an interrogative subject, facing the task of philosophy just like he faces the foreign land, modest yet constructive in his attempt to elaborate upon his intuitions. Thus arrives the existentialist analysis of foreignness. |
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| EXPLORE THE SERIES | ||
| Introduction | Part 1 |
| Particles of Foreignness | On Departing |
| Part 2 | Part 3 |
| On Being-Over-There | Here and Now : Being a Foreigner |